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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Sunday saw the transistor reach a venerable milestone – the ubiquitous technology is now sixty years old. Bell Labs employees William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain constructed the first ...

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.

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, ...