Dec 17
An Industry Built on Sand: Sixty Years of Transistors
Sixty years ago three scientists, , from Bell Laboratory in the US invented the Transistor - the tiny switches at the heart of all silicon chips - replacing vacuum tubes and mechanical relays and revolutionizing the entire electronics world. The team was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1956.
Analyst Malcolm Penn at BBC News writes an in-depth article on the history of transistor: “Following the transistor’s invention by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947, no one really knew quite what to do with the invention.
Little more than a laboratory curiosity, it was not until manufacturers realized that the tiny switches would enable products to be built smaller, more reliably and with less power consumption than with conventional electronic valves that the market started to develop.
It took the technologists five years to come up with the first practical transistor application - a hearing aid in 1952.
Eight years after the transistors first laboratory demonstration, launched in December 1955, the watershed product that truly grabbed the world’s attention was the first transistor radio, pocket-sized Regency TR1.
Most of the early device manufacturers were traditional valve companies, soon to be displaced by the fledgling specialist semiconductor companies, the most famous of which being Fairchild Semiconductor in Palo Alto, California and Texas Instruments (TI) in Dallas, Texas.
A spin out from Shockley Semiconductors, Fairchild proved to be a hotbed of technology innovation throughout the whole of the 1960s, including the invention of the Planar manufacturing process - the ability to print tiny patterns on the silicon surface using photographic techniques - still the foundation for today’s mainstream technology.
It was at Fairchild in 1965 that Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of chip-giant Intel, sketched out his prediction of the pace of silicon technology, subsequently became known as Moore’s law.” More at BBC News, Nobelprize.org.