Current Sources and Voltage References

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Chapter 8

Creating Current Sources with Power MOSFETs

Although the first metal-gate MOSFET had been developed at Bell Labs in 1960, the

FET was considered all but impossible to make by those who tried, because it was so

unstable. So it was not until 1963 when two young RCA researchers, Steve Hofstein

and Fred Heiman, made the first stable and working devices. By the mid-1960s, RCA

had some of the first small, metal-can MOSFETs in production and in its own con-

sumer products. In the early 1970s, DMOS, which had been developed in Japan,

became available in the United States. It was to become the foundation for subse-

quent power MOSFET development ...