Concept

Transistor

Overview

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electrical signals and power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semiconductor material, usually with at least three terminals for connection to an electronic circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals controls the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be higher than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Some transistors are packaged individually, but many more in miniature form are found embedded in integrated circuits. Because transistors are the key active components in practically all modern electronics, they are considered one of the 20th century's greatest inventions.

Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld proposed the concept of a field-effect transistor (FET) in 1925, but it was not possible to construct a working device at that time. The first working device was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at Bell Labs who shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement. The most widely used type of transistor, the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), was invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960. Transistors revolutionized the field of electronics and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, computers, and other electronic devices.

Most transistors are made from very pure silicon, and some from germanium, but certain other semiconductor materials are sometimes used. A transistor may have only one kind of charge carrier in a field-effect transistor, or may have two kinds of charge carriers in bipolar junction transistor devices. Compared with the vacuum tube, transistors are generally smaller and require less power to operate. Certain vacuum tubes have advantages over transistors at very high operating frequencies or high operating voltages, such as traveling-wave tubes and gyrotrons. Many types of transistors are made to standardized specifications by multiple manufacturers.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.

1. The three principal sources of our knowledge concerning atoms have been the light they emit, X-rays and radio-activity. As everyone knows, when the light emitted by a glowing gas is passed through a prism, it is found to consist of well-defined lines of different colours, which are characteristic for each element, and constitute what is called its “spectrum”. The spectrum extends beyond the range of visible light…

   Bertrand Russell, Philosophy

   States what Transistor is.

   Read the chapter · Open in the reader

2. Every such disturbance, we find, has a center, and when we get very near the center (though still at a finite distance from it) we find that the law of propagation of the disturbance ceases to be valid. This region within which the law does not hold is called “matter”; it will be an electron or proton according to circumstances. The region so defined is found to move relatively to other such regions, and its…

   Bertrand Russell, The A B C of Relativity

   States what Transistor is.

   Read the chapter · Open in the reader

3. Judging from the uncompressed fragments, the measure or bore of the lightning (if such a term may be used) must have been about one inch and a quarter. At Paris, M. Hachette and M. Beudant [11] succeeded in making tubes, in most respects similar to these fulgurites, by passing very strong shocks of galvanism through finely-powdered glass: when salt was added, so as to increase its fusibility, the tubes were larger…

   Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle

   Close in meaning to Transistor; the term itself is not named.

   Read the chapter · Open in the reader

Related ideas

• Integrated circuit
• Physicist
• PBS
• Vacuum tube
• World War II
• YouTube
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• MOSFET
• Transistor–transistor logic
• CMOS
• Wiley (publisher)
• Boston University
• Cambridge University Press
• Computer
• Electron
• Telephony
• Field-effect transistor
• Switch

Opposing perspectives

• Diode–transistor logic

Place in the tradition

Part of Logic gate.

Explore Transistor in the interactive graph →