: History of the transistor

Assorted discrete transistors. Packages in order from top to bottom: TO-3, TO-126, TO-92, SOT-23

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals. It is made of a solid piece of semiconductor material, with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current flowing through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be much more than the controlling (input) power, the transistor provides amplification of a signal. Today, some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.

The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and its presence is ubiquitous in modern electronic systems. Following its release in the early 1950s the transistor revolutionised the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, amongst other things.
Main article: History of the transistor

A replica of the first working transistor.

Physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld filed the first patent for a transistor in Canada in 1925, describing a device similar to a Field Effect Transistor or "FET".[1] However, Lilienfeld did not publish any research articles about his devices,[citation needed] nor did his patent cite any examples of devices actually constructed. In 1934, German inventor Oskar Heil patented a similar device.[2]

In 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Labs in the United States observed that when electrical contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, the output power was larger than the input. 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, and thus could be described as the "father of the transistor". The term was coined by John R. Pierce.[3] According to physicist/historian Robert Arns, legal papers from the Bell Labs patent show that William Shockley and Gerald Pearson had built operational versions from Lilienfeld's patents, yet they never referenced this work in any of their later research papers or historical articles.[4]

The name 'transistor' is a portmanteau of the term 'transfer resistor'.[5]

The first silicon transistor was produced by Texas Instruments in 1954.[6] This was the work of Gordon Teal, an expert in growing crystals of high purity, who had previously worked at Bell Labs.[7] The first MOS transistor actually built was by Kahng and Atalla at Bell Labs in 1960.[8]