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Transistor
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to:navigation, search Assorted discrete transistorsInelectronics, a
transistor
is asemiconductor devicecommonly used toamplifyor  switch electronicsignals. A transistor is made of a solid piece of asemiconductor   material, with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current flowingthrough another pair of terminals. Because the controlled current can be much larger thanthe controlling current, the transistor provides amplification of a signal. The transistor isthe fundamental building block of modernelectronic devices,and is used inradio, telephone,computer and other electronic systems. Some transistors are packaged individually but most are found inintegrated circuits.
Contents
[hide]
•
1 History
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2 Importance
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3 Usage
o
3.1 Switches
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3.2 Amplifiers
o
3.3 Computers
 
•
4 Comparison with vacuum tubes
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4.1 Advantages
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4.2 Disadvantages
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5 Types
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5.1 Bipolar junction transistor 
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5.2 Field-effect transistor 
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5.3 Other transistor types
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6 Semiconductor material
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7 Packaging
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8 See also
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9 References
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10 Further reading
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11 External links
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11.1 Datasheets
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11.2 Patents
[edit] History
Main article: History of the transistor 
A replica of the first working transistor.The first patent
[1]
for the field-effect transistor principle was filed in Canada by Austrian-Hungarian physicistJulius Edgar Lilienfeld on October 22, 1925, but Lilienfeld did not  publish any research articles about his devices.
[2]
In 1934 German physicist Dr.Oskar Heilpatented another field-effect transistor. There is no direct evidence that these deviceswere built, but later work in the 1990s shows that one of Lilienfeld's designs worked asdescribed and gave substantial gain. Legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that
 
William Shockley and Gerald Pearson had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles. On 17 November 1947 John Bardeen and Walter Brattain observed thatwhen electrical contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, the output power waslarger than the input. Shockley saw the potential in this and worked over the next fewmonths greatly expanding the knowledge of semiconductors and is considered by manyto be the 'father' of the transistor.
[edit] Importance
The transistor is considered by many to be the greatest invention of the twentiethcentury.
[3]
 It is the key active component in practically all modernelectronics. Its importance in today's society rests on its ability to be mass producedusing a highly automated process (fabrication
 
) that achieves astonishingly low per-transistor costs.Although several companies each produce over a billion individually-packaged (knownas
discrete
) transistors every year 
[4]
,the vast majority of transistors produced are inintegrated circuits (often shortened to
 IC 
,
microchips
or simply
chips
) along withdiodes,  resistors,capacitorsand other electronic componentsto produce complete electronic circuits. Alogic gateconsists of about twenty transistors whereas an advancedmicroprocessor, as of 2006, can use as many as 1.7 billion transistors (MOSFETs
 
). 
[5]
"About 60 million transistors were built this year [2002] ... for [each] man, woman, andchild on Earth."
[6]
The transistor's low cost, flexibility and reliability have made it a ubiquitous device.Transistorizedmechatronicscircuits have replacedelectromechanicalin controlling appliances and machinery. It is often easier and cheaper to use a standardmicrocontroller  and write acomputer program to carry out a control function than to design an equivalent mechanical control function.Because of the low cost of transistors and hence digital computers, there is a trend todigitizeinformation, such as theInternet Archive. With digital computers offering the ability to quickly find, sort and processdigital information, more and more effort has  been put into making information digital. As a result, today, much media data is deliveredin digital form, finally being converted and presented in analog form to the user. Areasinfluenced by theDigital Revolutionincludetelevision,radio, andnewspapers.
[edit] Usage
 For a basic guide to the operation of transistors, see  How a transistor works.
In the early days of transistor circuit design, the bipolar junction transistor , or BJT, wasthe most commonly used transistor. Even after MOSFETsbecame available, the BJTremained the transistor of choice for digital and analog circuits because of their ease of manufacture and speed. However, desirable properties of MOSFETs, such as their utility
of 00

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