Essential Guide to Semiconductors, The

How Transistors Work

Transistors are the most basic form of semiconductor construction as, as we saw before, the basic mud from which the towering spires of microprocessors, memory chips, and logic gates are built. The path and pace of semiconductor progress are measured by the speed and size of individual transistors, which long ago ceased to be visible to the naked eye. Today's transistors can be packed more than 10 million to the square inch and operate at nearly the speed of light. There doesn't seem any way that transistors could become any faster or any smaller, yet they always do.

Transistors have been around since 1947, when the very first one was created in a laboratory in New Jersey. That first transistor was as big as an adult's fist ...