The Rise of Semiconductors: Inventing The Transistor
There is no doubt that semiconductors have revolutionized society. They have become crucial to the way we use technology and innovate. Semiconductors have become a part of everyday life. Behind every device from a mobile phone to a car contains several semiconductors in the form of chips. Semiconductors have gotten increasingly complex over the years due to innovations in the electrical engineering field. However, no innovation has contributed to the current state of highly capable chips more than the transistor.
To understand the significance of the transistor, we must first take a look at its predecessor: the vacuum tube. The vacuum tube was an electronic device that essentially acted as a switch where the current would flow through it if given ample voltage. On the other hand, if not enough current was fed to the tube, the current would not be able to pass through the tube. The vacuum tube had been used for many purposes such as telephone networks, radars, television, radio, and even early digital computers. Following the end of World War II, Mervin Kelly who was the director of research at Bell Labs sought an alternative to the vacuum tube. This was spurred by his recognition of vacuum tubes as unreliable, power-hungry, and unsafe.
In 1945, Kelly brought together a team of scientists to develop an alternative solution to vacuum tubes. The team included Bill Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen. Shockley, a young and was drafted as the team leader. There were many other physicists, chemists, and engineerings that joined the group making it diverse and closely knit.
After nearly two years of work, Brattain and Bardeen had created the point-contact transistor. Shockley was pleased with this result but at the same time, was displeased with the fact that he was not involved in this discovery. As jealousy built up inside of Shockley, he decided to one-up his teammates’ discovery. Thus, he created the junction transistor which was more rugged practical than the point-contact transistor. The invention was eventually unveiled by Bell Labs in June of 1948.
While the transistor was revolutionary, it gained little interest at the time it was unveiled. Shockley, seeing how lucrative this invention could be, left Bell Labs to start his own semiconductor company, Shockley Semiconductor. During this time, many other corporations such as Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, and Texas Instruments. Later in the 1950s and 1960s, the military market allowed for the transistor to reach levels of dispersion unlike before. Soon after, the transistor found its way into technologies such as radios and many more.
From then on, the transistor became widely used and spurred the invention of many other semiconductor-related devices. Transistors allowed for the invention of integrated circuits which were more complex circuits capable of greater computational power. Today, high-performance chips such as those found in servers and our daily mobile devices still use transistors, albeit being much more efficient than the first iteration. Transistors have paved the way for high-performance computing, which has become crucial in many applications such as the medical field, transportation industry, and many more. Behind every autonomous car, supercomputer, and space rocket is a computer chip: a computer chip made of transistors.
