75th Anniversary of the Transistor

Today is a very significant anniversary for the whole of the human race. But if you are reading Breakfast Bytes, it is especially important for whatever you do. Today is the 75th anniversary of the invention of the transistor.

There is actually no precise moment that the transistor was invented. But the American Physical Society (APS), in an article titled November 17 - December 23, 1947: Invention of the First Transistor, says:

John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley spearheaded the Bell Labs effort to develop a new means of amplification, speculating that by adding a third electrode to the semiconductor detector, they would be able to control the amount of current flowing through the silicon. The resulting device would, theoretically, amplify as well as the vacuum tube with much less power consumption and in a fraction of the space. The research efforts peaked during the so-called "Miracle Month:" November 17 to December 23, 1947.

Today is about the middle of that period, so it seems as good a day to pick as any. Of course, Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain would go on to win the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.

The final design for the point-contact transistor had two gold contacts lightly touching a germanium crystal that was on a metal plate connected to a voltage source. The image above is actually a replica of the original transistor at the Computer History Museum.

However, the central character in all of this would turn out to be Shockley. He would make transistors manufacturable at scale. As I said in my post The Brief but Spectacular History of Shockley Labs:

On June 26th 1948, Bell Labs filed for a patent on the bipolar junction transistor invented by Shockley. This is not the original point-contact transistor, invented by Shockley, Bratten, and Bardeen. This was wonderful science but not the basis for industrial manufacture. The bipolar junction transistor was not an experimental device, it was an extraordinary piece of imagination that Shockley came up with when he was bored in a three-day meeting. Then on April 7th 1949, Gordon Teal at Bell Labs used a crystal growth technique to build the first junction transistor (using germanium, not silicon). Finally, on June 1st 1955, Shockley left Bell Labs to start a company to make silicon bipolar devices (and other semiconductor devices).

In addition to putting the silicon in Silicon Valley, Shockley also pretty much invented the startup. As said in my post, Who Put the Silicon in Silicon Valley?:

Another claimant for putting silicon in Silicon Valley, as opposed to New Jersey, was Shockley's mother, who was a mining engineer, which must have been an unusual profession for a woman in that era. She fell ill and so Shockley moved from New Jersey to California to be near her, and started Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. He was unable to persuade his Bell Labs colleagues to move west and join him, so he hired a group of PhD graduates mostly from Stanford, thus also pioneering the type of startup model that floods Silicon Valley today. Maybe he put the startup in Silicon Valley, as well as the silicon. Although, transistors were still not silicon yet.

But Shockley's management style was poor, so a group of eight engineers, who became known as the "traitorous eight," left to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Shockley told them they would never be successful. Since those people were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts, who would basically invent the integrated circuit (along with Kilbee at TI in Texas), this has to count as one of the least accurate prediction of all time.

But today's post is more about the anniversary of the invention of the transistor than the history of Silicon Vally.

68th International Electron Devices Meeting

IEDM starts on Saturday. See my post, IEDM and RISC-V Summit 2022 Previews, for more details. As you can see, since this is the 68th IEDM and the 75th year of the transistor, the conference started very soon after. In fact, it was mostly about vacuum tubes (valves in British English), not transistors, for many years.

 

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.

.