You just can’t reinvent the transistor enough times.

Point-contact transistor

Grown-junction transistor

Tetrode point-contact transistor

Alloy-junction transistor

Junction field-effect transistor (JFET)

Surface-barrier transistor

Drift-field transistor

Modern BJT (diffused junction bipolar junction transistor)

Heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT)

MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor)

Thin-film transistor

Schottky transistor

MESFET (metal-semiconductor field-effect transistor)

Floating-gate MOSFET

IGBT (insulated-gate bipolar transistor)

HEMT (high-electron-mobility transistor)

Flash memory cell

FinFET

Carbon nanotube transistor

Single-atom transistor

Tunnel FET

Vertical 3D NAND (modern flash cell)

Graphene transistor
Invented Commercialized Nanosheet (gate-all-around transistor)

Complementary FET

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020

THE ULTIMATE
TRANSISTOR TIMELINE
The transistor’s How it Worked,” p. 24). Since then, engi-
neers have reinvented the transistor over
amazing evolution and over again, raiding condensed-matter
from point contacts physics for anything that might offer even
the possibility of turning a small signal into
to quantum tunnels a larger one.
by Stephen Cass But physics is one thing; mass pro-
duction is another. This timeline shows
the time elapsed between the invention
Even as the initial sales receipts for of a number of transistor types and the
the first transistors to hit the market were year they became commercially available.
being tallied up in 1948, the next genera- To be honest, finding the latter set of
tion of transistors had already been dates was often a murky business, and
invented (see “The First Transistor and we welcome corrections. But it’s clear
that the initial breakneck pace of inno-
vation seems to have slowed from 1970
to 2000, likely because these were the
golden years for Moore’s Law, when scal-
ing down the dimensions of the existing
metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect
transistors (MOSFETs) led to computers
that doubled in speed every couple of
years for the same money. Then, when
the inevitable end of this exponential
improvement loomed on the horizon, a
renaissance in transistor invention
seems to have begun and continues to
this day.

DECEMBER
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