Invented in 1947 at Bell Labs by John Bardeen,
Walter Brattain and William Shockley, the transistor is a semiconductor device
used to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical powers. This
little invention revolutionized the field of electronics and paved the way for
cool things that we’d probably be unable to live without in 2013 such as the
calculator, computer and radio. Why? Basically, a transistor is like a
miniature on-off switch that allows a computer to process information.
Computers can’t operate without an integrated circuit (chip) and a chip can’t
operate without a transistor.
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| different types of Transistors |
In the 1950s, the first transistor radio used only
four transistors while in 1971, the first Intel chip used 2300. The latest chip
has 820 million of these little miracles. Even more interesting is the fact
that the original transistor could be held in your hand while current
transistors are so small that more than two million 22nm tri-gate transistors
could fit on the full stop at the end of this sentence. Today, more than a
billion Nobel prize winning transistors are manufactured across the globe every
second.
