Birthday Quote

The Transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and is ubiquitous in modern electronic systems.

First demonstrated at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, USA, on December 23rd 1947, a transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power.

From November 17th 1947 to December 23rd 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain performed experiments and observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input. The Solid State Physics Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors.

The transistor revolutionised the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper devices. Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement and, in 2009, the invention of the first transistor at Bell Labs was named an IEEE Milestone

Low cost, flexibility, and reliability have made it a ubiquitous device. The transistor is the key active component in practically all modern electronics. Functioning as amplifiers, they are used in everything from from mobile phones to televisions. Many consider it to be one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. Its importance in today's society rests on its ability to be mass-produced using a highly automated process (semiconductor device fabrication) that achieves astonishingly low per-transistor costs.

The vast majority of transistors are now produced as part of integrated circuits (often shortened to IC, microchips or simply chips), along with diodes, resistors, capacitors and other electronic components, to produce complete electronic circuits. Whilst a logic gate might consist of about twenty transistors an advanced computer microprocessor can use as many as 3 billion transistors.

In 2002 around 60 million transistors were manufactured for every person on earth.

"We tend to credit those who create an idea, not those who perfect it, forgetting that it is often only in the perfection of an idea that true progress occurs. Putting sixty-four transistors on a chip allowed people to dream of the future. Putting four million transistors on a chip actually gave them the future."

Malcolm Gladwell

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