Beyond the power variant, it sometimes seems as though we rarely encounter a discrete transistor these days, such has been the advance of integrated electronics. But they have a rich history, going ...

In What’s the point?: The Point Contact transistor I discussed Shockley’s white paper on the theory of the Point Contact Transistor. Let’s look further into this early transistor design. It is ...

NATURE ABHORS A vacuum tube," cracked Bell Labs physicist John Pierce. So did almost everyone else by the 1940s. Sure, vacuum tubes boosted the power of the phone network's electrical signals, which ...

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Shockley had continued his semiconductor work, and in 1948 patented the modern junction transistor. Three years later, Bell Labs demonstrated part number M1752 ...

The sandwich transistor was William Shockley's brainchild. It's also called the junction transistor. While the rest of the lab was busy researching Bardeen and Brattain's point-contact transistor, ...

(Nanowerk Spotlight) On December 26, 1947, the two physicists Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, officially demonstrated the first point-contact transistor at Bell Labs. Later, in January 1948, William ...

The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

In his 1948 white paper 1, Shockley wrote, “The theory of the point-contact transistor is that the emitter point-contact introduces holes into the n-type base material. The collector point-contact, ...