![]() My dad's Casio watch from 1990 had more computing power and didn't require nearly that much power. That doesn't seem like much compared to now, but it only had 200 transistors and 1300 diodes. One of the first transistor based computers required 150 watts, but it used point-contact transistors. MOSFETs actually have a very high gate impedance by design, which makes them very good at reducing the amount of wattage a circuit requires to run. On the other hand, MOSFETs only require a voltage at the gate pin to allow current flow between the drain and source pins. MOSFETs differ from BJTs in that BJTs require that a current be applied to the base pin in order for current to flow between the collector and emitter pins. It wasn't until 1960 that the first MOSFET was introduced by Dawon Kahng and Martin Atalla. Julius Lilienfeld had actually described what we know now as the field effect transistor, or FET (more specifically he predicted the JFET), in his patent of 1925, and it was the FET that the guys at Bell Labs were trying to produce when they developed the point-contact transistor. For some practical applications of BJTs, see my BJT Instructable. It wasn't until 1950 that Shockley developed the bi-polar transistor (BJTs) that became so ubiquitous, and still is today. ![]() William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of Bell Labs spent many years and LOTS of money researching and developing what became the point-contact transistor, which was a PNP type transistor and was successfully demonstrated as a voice amplifier on 23 Dec, 1947. The idea of the transistor was first developed and patented in 1925 by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, but manufacturing techniques for the required materials weren't good enough to produce a high enough quality crystal and so development and testing came much later. ![]() Without them, life would be drastically different. Radios, phones, computers, game consoles, TVs, cars, toys. They are nearly everywhere, in nearly every electronic device we use. Transistors are arguably the most important electronic component in use today. (First of all, I made some edits to the HTML code for this I'ble, which is optimized for the desktop site, so it may not be ideally viewed on a mobile device.)
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |