Semiconductors and the Information Revolution

CHAPTER 1. What Exactly is a Semiconductor

and what can it do?

For many people, the run-up to Christmas 1947 probably represented a welcome return to some semblance of peaceful normality following the end of the Second World War hostilities. But at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ something altogether more significant was in the air. On 16 December Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, senior members of William Shockley's Solid State Physics Group, observed for the very first time the phenomenon of electronic power gain from their Heath Robinson arrangement of springs and wires, connected to a small piece of germanium crystal. The culmination of two years of concentrated effort, this was the world's first solid state amplifier and ...