In December 1947, a research team composed of Shockley, Bardeen and Bratton at Bell Labs in the United States developed a point-contact germanium transistor. The advent of the transistor was a major invention in the 20th century and the harbinger of the microelectronics revolution. After the advent of the transistor, people were able to replace the large, power-consuming electronic tubes with a compact, low-power-consuming electronic device. The invention of the transistor sounded the clarion call for the later birth of the integrated circuit.
In the first decade of the 20th century, communication systems began to use semiconductor materials. In the first half of the 20th century, mineral radios, which were widely popular among radio enthusiasts, used semiconductor materials such as minerals for detection. The electrical properties of semiconductors are also used in telephone systems.
The invention of the transistor can be traced back to 1929, when engineer Lilienfeld had patented a transistor. However, due to the technical level at the time, the materials used to make such devices were not pure enough, making it impossible to manufacture such transistors.
Because the effect of vacuum tubes in processing high-frequency signals is not ideal, people try to improve the mineral whisker detector used in mineral radios. In this kind of detector, there is a metal wire (as thin as a hair and can form a detection contact) that is in contact with the surface of the ore (semiconductor). It allows the signal current to flow in one direction and prevents the signal current from flowing in the opposite direction. direction flow. On the eve of the outbreak of World War II, Bell Laboratories was looking for a detection material with better performance than the early galena crystal. It was discovered that the performance of germanium crystal mixed with a very small amount of impurities was not only better than that of ore crystal, but also Better than tube rectifiers in some ways.
During the Second World War, many laboratories also made many achievements in the manufacturing and theoretical research of silicon and germanium materials, which laid the foundation for the invention of the transistor.
In order to overcome the limitations of electron tubes, after the end of World War II, Bell Labs stepped up basic research on solid electronic devices. Shockley and others decided to focus on research on semiconductor materials such as silicon and germanium, and explore the possibility of using semiconductor materials to make amplifier devices.
In the autumn of 1945, Bell Labs established a semiconductor research group headed by Shockley, with members including Bratton, Bardeen and others. Bratton began working in this laboratory as early as 1929. He has been engaged in semiconductor research for a long time and has accumulated rich experience. After a series of experiments and observations, they gradually realized the cause of the current amplification effect in semiconductors. Bratton discovered that by connecting an electrode to the bottom surface of the germanium piece, inserting a thin needle on the other side and passing on current, and then bringing another thin needle as close as possible to it and passing on a weak current, the original The current makes a big difference. A small change in the weak current will have a great impact on other currents. This is the "amplification" effect.
Bratton and others have also come up with effective ways to achieve this amplification effect. They input a weak signal between the emitter and the base, and it is amplified into a strong signal at the output between the collector and the base. In modern electronic products, the amplification effect of the above-mentioned transistor is widely used.
The magnification of the solid-state device originally made by Bardeen and Bratton was about 50. Soon after, they used two very close (0.05 mm apart) whisker contacts to replace the gold foil contacts and created a "point contact transistor". In December 1947, the world's earliest practical semiconductor device finally came out. In the first test, it could amplify audio signals 100 times. Its appearance was shorter than a matchstick, but thicker.
When naming this device, Bratton thought of its resistance conversion characteristics, that is, it works by transferring current from a "low resistance input" to a "high resistance output". So it was named trans-resister (conversion resistor), which was later abbreviated to transister. The Chinese translation is transistor.
Due to the complex manufacturing process of point contact transistors, many products have failed. It also has shortcomings such as high noise, difficulty in controlling when the power is high, and narrow application range. In order to overcome these shortcomings, Shockley proposed the bold idea of ??using a "rectifier junction" to replace the metal semiconductor contacts. The semiconductor research team has proposed the working principle of this semiconductor device.
In 1950, the first "junction transistor" came out, and its performance was exactly as Shockley originally envisioned. Most of today's transistors are still junction transistors.
In 1956, Shockley, Bardeen, and Bratton won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention of the transistor. [Edit this paragraph] The development history of the transistor and its important milestones December 16, 1947: William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain successfully invented the transistor at Bell The first transistor is made in the laboratory.
1950: William Thackeray developed the Bipolar Junction Transistor, which is the current standard transistor.
1953: The first commercial device using transistors is put on the market, the hearing aid.
October 18, 1954: The first transistor radio, the Regency TR1, was put on the market, containing only 4 germanium transistors.
April 25, 1961: The first integrated circuit patent is awarded to Robert Noyce. Initial transistors were sufficient for radios and telephones, but new electronic devices required smaller transistors, known as integrated circuits.
1965: Moore’s Law was born. At that time, Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors on a chip would roughly double every year in the future (revised to every two years after 10 years). Moore's Law was announced in an article in Electronics Magazine.
July 1968: Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore resigned from Fairchild Semiconductor Company and founded a new company, Intel Corporation. The English name Intel is "Integrated Electronics" Abbreviation for "integrated electronics".
1969: Intel successfully developed the first PMOS silicon gate transistor technology. These transistors continue to use the traditional silicon dioxide gate dielectric, but introduce a new polysilicon gate electrode.
1971: Intel releases its first microprocessor, the 4004. The 4004 was 1/8-inch x 1/16-inch, contained just over 2,000 transistors, and was produced using Intel's 10-micron PMOS technology.
1978: Intel iconically sold the Intel 8088 microprocessor to IBM's new personal computer division, arming the central brain of IBM's new product, the IBM PC. The 16-bit 8088 processor contains 29,000 transistors and runs at 5MHz, 8MHz and 10MHz. The success of the 8088 propelled Intel into the Fortune 500 rankings, and Fortune magazine named Intel one of the "Business Triumphs of the Seventies."
1982: The 286 microprocessor (also known as the 80286) is introduced, becoming Intel's first 16-bit processor and capable of running all software written for Intel's previous generation products. The 286 processor used 13,400 transistors and ran at 6MHz, 8MHz, 10MHz and 12.5MHz.
1985: The Intel 386?6?4 microprocessor is released, containing 275,000 transistors, more than 100 times the number of transistors in the original 4004. The 386 is a 32-bit chip with multitasking capabilities, meaning it can run multiple programs at the same time.
1993: The Intel Pentium processor was launched, containing 3 million transistors and produced using Intel's 0.8 micron process technology.
February 1999: Intel released the Pentium III processor. The Pentium III is a 1x1 square of silicon containing 9.5 million transistors and is produced using Intel's 0.25 micron process technology.
January 2002: Intel Pentium 4 processor was launched, allowing high-performance desktop computers to achieve 2.2 billion cycles per second.
It is produced using Intel's 0.13 micron process technology and contains 55 million transistors.
August 13, 2002: Intel revealed several technological breakthroughs in 90nm process technology, including high-performance, low-power transistors, strained silicon, high-speed copper connectors and new low-k dielectric materials. This is the first time in the industry that strained silicon has been used in production.
March 12, 2003: The Intel·Centrino·Mobile Technology Platform for notebooks was born, including Intel's latest mobile processor "Intel Pentium M Processor". The processor is based on a new mobile-optimized microarchitecture and is produced using Intel's 0.13-micron process technology and contains 77 million transistors.
May 26, 2005: Intel's first mainstream dual-core processor "Intel Pentium D Processor" was born, containing 230 million transistors and produced using Intel's leading 90-nanometer process technology.
July 18, 2006: Intel Itanium 2 dual-core processor was released, using the world's most complex product design, containing 1.72 billion transistors. The processor is produced using Intel's 90nm process technology.
July 27, 2006: Intel Core 6 42 dual-core processor was born. The processor contains more than 290 million transistors and is produced in several of the world's most advanced laboratories using Intel's 65nm process technology.
September 26, 2006: Intel announced that more than 15 45nm process products are under development for the desktop, notebook and enterprise computing markets. The research and development code Penryn is derived from Intel? Core? 6? 4 microarchitecture is derived.
January 8, 2007: In order to expand the sales of quad-core PCs to mainstream buyers, Intel released the 65nm Intel Core 6 42 quad-core processor for desktop computers and two other Quad-core server processor. The Intel Core 6 42 quad-core processor contains more than 580 million transistors.
January 29, 2007: Intel announced the use of breakthrough transistor materials, namely high-k gate dielectric and metal gate. Intel will use these materials in the company's next-generation processors - Intel Core 6 42 Duo, Intel Core 6 42 Quad processors and Intel Xeon series multi-core processors in billions of 45 Nanotransistors, or tiny switches, are used to build insulating "walls" and switching "doors," codenamed Penryn. Using these advanced transistors, Intel's 45nm microprocessors have been produced.