Talk:Transistor

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 January 2020 and 14 May 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: Wintersfire.

Transistor aging compared to a vacuum tube

Is it really appropriate to include aging as a limitation in a section comparing them to tubes? In isolation it would be a valid concern but compared against a tube with almost infintiely worse long term reliability it becomes an advantage rather than a limitation. I was tempted to simply snip that on sight but I figure I'll raise it here first, I know people can be hesitant to remove sourced material even if as here the source does not directly support the assertion made - the source does not even mention tubes. 3142 (talk) 13:55, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

I used to work for a semiconductor manufacturer. One of my duties was to waive failures in the accelerated aging tests, provided a reason for the premature failure could be found that would not occur in real products. I agree the bullet about aging of transistors should be removed. Jc3s5h (talk) 15:28, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Wrong link

2N3904 transistor has incorrect datasheet link — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.222.90.140 (talk) 12:28, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Fixed. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:55, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

Germans made the first working Transistor

The world's first working device was built in Paris by German scientists Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker , who preceded the Bell Labs, Moreover their prototype was more advanced than the prototype of Bell Labs. See: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/how-europe-missed-the-transistor Just because the War Crimes of Germans , it was impossible to receive Global attention for Germans after the war.--Regtraht (talk) 18:01, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

"he French device “turns out...to be superior to its American counterpart,” read a more measured but still favorable account in Toute la Radio, a technical journal [see drawing and photo]. “The latter has a limited lifetime and appears to be fairly unstable, whereas the existing transistrons do not show any sign of fatigue.”

According to Mataré, this superiority could be attributed to the care they employed in fabricating their devices. While observing the process with microscopes, the women working on the small assembly line would measure current-voltage curves for both metal points with oscilloscopes and fix the points rigidly on the germanium with drops of epoxy after the curves matched the desired characteristics. When Brattain and Shockley visited the Paris group in 1950, Mataré showed them telephone amplifiers made with his transistrons—which allowed him to place a call all the way to Algiers. “That’s quite something,” admitted Shockley a bit guardedly, Mataré recalls half a century later." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Regtraht (talk • contribs) 19:28, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

The Spectrum article states, "Mataré reckons he first recognized this effect in early 1948 (perhaps a month or two after Bardeen and Brattain’s breakthrough at Bell Labs)." (empahsis added) Near simultaneous invention is not uncommon but this seems to clearly establish that the Paris invention was second. Tom94022 (talk) 19:50, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

Your reference article also says the following ...

"On a hunch, he asked Welker to fashion larger germanium samples, from which they could cut slivers of higher purity. Using this higher-grade material, Mataré finally got consistent amplification in June 1948, six months after Bardeen and Brattain. Encouraged by this success, they phoned PTT Secretary Eugène Thomas and invited him over for a demonstration. But Thomas was apparently too busy—or perhaps not interested enough—to come by."

Finally, Matare was able to finally get transistor amplification to work on his "Transitron" device (June 1948) and he had applied for a patent on August 13th 1948, well after Bell Labs transistor's discovery and announcement. Historianbuff (talk) 22:40, 19 November 2019 (UTC)

Symbology

If it worth mention the old symbology. https://mixedsignal.wordpress.com/2015/12/14/the-transistor-symbol/ --Kitchen Knife (talk) 22:58, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

There were a number of early symbols for transistors. For example, IBM used its own symbols for bipolar transistors from the 1950s through the 1990s. Jc3s5h (talk) 23:14, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Doesn't surprise me. https:/upwiki/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/IBM_608_Logic_Gates.jpg/440px-IBM_608_Logic_Gates.jpg --Kitchen Knife (talk) 00:39, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

MOSFET Invention, who invented it and it's importance

I am currently reading To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology by Ross Knox Bassett. Bassett is professional historian of science, so his work is as reliable as it gets. I have huge problems with the way this article and other present history of MOS transistor. First of all as Bassett show there was very little new in Attalah and Kahng invention, as Bassett puts it:

"Atalla appears to have conceived it, but it was an invention in a different sense than the transistors of Bardeen and Brattain and Shockley. The invention of both the pointcontact transistor and the junction transistor involved novel effects. The principles that Atalla’s device used were well known; veterans in the field would have recognized them as ones that had been tried without success by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley. Atalla recycled these principles using the advanced fabrication techniques that Bell Labs had developed to make diffused bipolar junction transistors. In some sense Atalla’s biggest breakthrough was an intellectual one, thinking that such a device was worth making at all"(page 24). Attalah and Kahng doe not even give this device a name, again from Bassett:

"Atalla and Kahng’s writings provide evidence that even they had ambivalence about what they had done. A name is obviously one of the first steps in the serious consideration of any kind of invention, and Atalla and Kahng’s failure to name their device implies that they saw it as stillborn. They did not even identify their device as a transistor, suggesting a reluctance to even put their work into the same family line as the work of Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley. Atalla and Kahng’s paper at the 1960 SSDRC did not establish their device as a promising subject for research or even as something recognized by the semiconductor community at large. The conference chairman made no mention of Atalla and Kahng’s work in his brief report on the technical highlights of the conference, although he did mention Bell’s epitaxial transistor. No further work on a device like Atalla and Kahng’s was presented at either the SSDRC or the Electron Device Conference over the next two years. Two articles reviewing the state of the semiconductor field in 1962 made no mention of Atalla and Kahng’s device. Their work seemed to be a dead end".

The reason MOS transistor even received attention was due two factors:first passivation of silicon surfaces by silicon dioxide gave hope the problems of semiconductor surfaces could be resolved, and second invention of integrated circuit change the way transistor are judged, making MOS simplicity attractive to some(page 13). It will take many years and many people working on it to make MOS practical. Again Basset write that, for example in IBM even in 1967 the future of MOS technology was far from clear(page 106). Contribution from people like Wanlass was just as important as Atalla and Kahng work. DMKR2005 (talk) 21:33, 13 February 2021 (UTC)