Beyond the power variant, it sometimes seems as though we rarely encounter a discrete transistor these days, such has been the advance of integrated electronics. But they have a rich history, going ...

In What’s the point?: The Point Contact transistor I discussed Shockley’s white paper on the theory of the Point Contact Transistor. Let’s look further into this early transistor design. It is ...

Bell Laboratories, one of the world’s largest industrial laboratories and now part of Lucent Technologies, was originally the research and development arm of the giant telephone company American ...

Transistors have come a long way. Like everything else electronic, they’ve become both better and cheaper. According to a recent IEEE article, a transistor cost about $8 in today’s money back in the ...

The transistor, the fundamental base to all of our electronic devices, turns 65-years-old today. Though the concept of a transistor had been worked on decades earlier, it was on December 16, 1947 when ...

The telephone company had problems with vacuum tubes, too, and hoped to find something else to use for switching telephone calls. The idea of somehow using semiconductors (solid materials such as ...

In his 1948 white paper 1, Shockley wrote, “The theory of the point-contact transistor is that the emitter point-contact introduces holes into the n-type base material. The collector point-contact, ...

The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.