Lesson 4 - Transistor

TRANSISTOR
Introduction
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable,
electronic, general purpose digital computer. ENAIC was completed in 1945.
ENIAC contained 18,000 vacuum tubes; 7,200 crystal diodes; 1,500 relays; 70,000 resistors;
10,000 capacitors; and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints.
Vacuum tube
An electron tube (also known as a 'Vacuum tube', or a 'Valve') is a glass or metal enclosure in
which electrons move through the vacuum or gas from one metal electrode to another.
The vacuum tube is often used to amplify weak currents or act as a one-way valve (rectifier)
for electric current.
The simplest vacuum tube, the diode, invented in 1904 by John Ambrose Fleming,
contains only a heated electron-emitting cathode and an anode. Electrons can only flow in
one direction through the device from the cathode to the anode. Adding one or more control
grids within the tube allows the current between the cathode and anode to be controlled by
the voltage on the grids
.
Operation of Grid
In a valve, the hot cathode emits negatively charged electrons, which are attracted
to and captured by the anode, which is given a positive voltage by a power supply. The
control grid between the cathode and anode functions as a "gate" to control the current of
electrons reaching the anode. A more negative voltage on the grid will repel the electrons
back toward the cathode so fewer get through to the anode. A less negative, or positive,
voltage on the grid will allow more electrons through, increasing the anode current. A given
change in grid voltage causes a proportional change in plate current, so if a time-varying
voltage is applied to the grid, the plate current waveform will be a copy of the applied grid
voltage.
A relatively small variation in voltage on the control grid causes a significantly large
variation in anode current. The presence of a resistor in the anode circuit causes a large
variation in voltage to appear at the anode. The variation in anode voltage can be much
larger than the variation in grid voltage which caused it, and thus the tube can amplify,
functioning as an amplifier.
Transistor
A transistor is a semiconductor device with at least three terminals for connection to
an electric circuit. In the common case, the third terminal controls the flow of current
between the other two terminals. This can be used for amplification, as in the case of
a radio receiver, or for rapid switching, as in the case of digital circuits . The transistor
replaced the vacuum-tube triode, also called a (thermionic) valve, which was much larger in
size and used significantly more power to operate.
The first transistor was successfully demonstrated on December 23, 1947 at Bell
Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Bell Labs is the research arm of American
Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). The three individuals credited with the invention of the
transistor were William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain.
Bell Telephone Laboratories needed a generic name for the new invention:
"Semiconductor Triode", "Surface States Triode", "Crystal Triode", "Solid Triode" and
"Iotatron" were all considered, but "Transistor," coined by John R. Pierce, was the clear
winner of an internal ballot (owing in part to the affinity that Bell engineers had developed
for the suffix "-istor").
Transistor is an abbreviated combination of the words "transconductance" or
"transfer", and "varistor". The device logically belongs in the varistor family, and has the
transconductance or transfer impedance of a device having gain, so that this combination is
descriptive.
Transconductance (for transfer conductance), also infrequently
called mutual conductance, is the electrical characteristic relating the current through the
output of a device to the voltage across the input of a device. Conductance is the reciprocal
of resistance.
Transadmittance (or transfer admittance) is the AC equivalent of transconductance.
A varistor is an electronic component with an electrical resistance that varies with
the applied voltage. Also known as a voltage-dependent resistor (VDR), it has a nonlinear,
non-ohmic current–voltage characteristic that is similar to that of a diode.
The world's first transistor computer was built at the University of Manchester in
November 1953. The computer was built by Richard Grimsdale, then a research student in
the Department of Electrical Engineering and later a Professor of Electronic Engineering at
Sussex University. The machine used point-contact transistors, made in small quantities by
STC and Mullard.
Improvement in transistor design
Switch to silicon
Germanium was difficult to purify, and had a limited Transistor technology timeline
operational temperature range. Scientists theorized
that silicon would be easier to fabricate, but few
bothered to investigate this possibility. Morris Year Technology Organization
Tanenbaum et al. at Bell Laboratories were the first to
develop a working silicon transistor on January 26,
1954. 1947 Point contact Bell Labs
A superior method was developed by Morris

Tanenbaum and Calvin S. Fuller at Bell Laboratories in 1948 Grown junction Bell Labs
early 1955 by the gaseous diffusion of donor and
acceptor impurities into single crystal silicon chips.
1951 Alloy junction General Electric
Silicon surface passivation
In 1955, Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick at Bell
Telephone Laboratories (BTL) accidentally discovered 1953 Surface barrier Philco
that silicon dioxide (SiO2) could be grown on silicon.
They showed that oxide layer prevented certain
dopants into the silicon wafer. 1953 JFET Bell Labs
In the 1950s, Mohamed Atalla, picked up

Frosch's work on oxidation, investigated the surface
1954 Diffused base Bell Labs
properties of silicon semiconductors at Bell Labs,
where he proposed a new method of semiconductor
device fabrication, coating a silicon wafer with an 1954 Mesa Bell Labs
insulating layer of silicon oxide so that electricity could
reliably penetrate to the conducting silicon below,
overcoming the surface states that prevented 1959 Planar Fairchild
electricity from reaching the semiconducting layer. This
is known as surface passivation.
Planar process 1959 MOSFET Bell Labs
The planar process was developed by Jean Hoerni

while working at Fairchild Semiconductor, with a first patent issued in 1959. The planar
process used to make these transistors made mass-produced monolithic silicon integrated
circuits possible.
MOSFET
In 1959 the MOSFET was introduced and in 2020 it is still the dominant transistor type in
use. The key advantages of a MOSFET transistors over BJTs are that they consume no
current except when switching states and they have faster switching speed (ideal for digital
signals).
Classification of transistor

Lesson 4 - Transistor

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Lesson 4 - Transistor

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TRANSISTOR

A superior method was developed by Morris

In the 1950s, Mohamed Atalla, picked up

The planar process was developed by Jean Hoerni

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