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 ...

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, ...

Transistors have come a long way. Like everything else electronic, they’ve become both better and cheaper. According to a recent IEEE article, a transistor cost about $8 in today’s money back in the ...

The first commercially available transistors weren't much like the ones we use today. For one thing, they were big enough to actually see -- something the millions of transistors on a tiny computer ...

In this lesson, students build two circuits and explore how transistors function. When Bell Labs introduced the transistor in June of 1948, a spokesman proudly announced "This cylindrical object . . .

65 years ago, December 16th 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain operated the first ever working point-contact transistor, almost known as the iotatron. Now, so many years later, ...

The telephone company had problems with vacuum tubes, too, and hoped to find something else to use for switching telephone calls. The idea of somehow using semiconductors (solid materials such as ...

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.

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 ...