Few, if any, episodes in the history of innovation can compare. It was this rare combination of basic research and fundamental technology development that made modern transistors and microchips possible. Much less familiar is the story of technology development that ensued. The saga of the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs is a fairly well-known tale that is often retold when questions arise about the importance of basic research in the innovation process. If this technology can ever be transferred to the production line, another hundredfold reduction in the size of transistors may be in the offing. If we had instead had to rely on vacuum tubes, for example, the computing power of a Pentium chip would require a machine as big as the Pentagon.Īnd just this past year-which also happens to be the centennial of the electron’s discovery-there have been successful attempts to build transistors so small that they involve the transmission of only one electron through a channel less than 10 nanometers long. More than any other factor, the fantastic shrinkage of the transistor in both size and cost is what has allowed the average person to own and operate a computer that is far more powerful than anything the armed services or major corporations could afford a few decades ago. He made this comment in 1977, a few years before the personal computer began to stimulate yet another commercial explosion based on semiconductors. “The synergy between a new component and a new application generated an explosive growth of both,” observed Moore’s longtime partner Robert Noyce, reflecting on how the transistor and computer grew up together. As Intel’s cofounder Gordon Moore recently noted, there are more transistors made every year than raindrops falling on California, and producing one costs less than printing a single character in a newspaper. Today the transistor is little more than an abstract physical principle imprinted innumerable times on narrow slivers of silicon-millions of microscopic ripples on a shimmering crystal sea. With the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the stage was set for a steady parade of further innovations that reduced the size of transistors to submicron levels-less than a millionth of a meter. The first transistors were typically a centimeter long by the late 1950s, they were measured in millimeters. And the tubes’ other problems-they were balky, burned out too frequently, generated too much heat, and consumed too much power-proved completely insurmountable. By contrast, vacuum tubes had absolutely no prospects for the kind of astonishing miniaturization that has occurred in solid-state devices. The transistor’s greatest value is that it can be so drastically miniaturized: its fundamental operating principles have remained essentially unaltered as its linear dimensions have shrunk more than 10,000-fold. The physical process Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley discovered now lies at the throbbing heart of an electronics industry that generates worldwide sales of more than $1 trillion annually. “It seems to me that in these robot brains the transistor is the ideal nerve cell.” “There has recently been a great deal of thought spent on electronic brains or computing machines,” he speculated in December 1949. Shockley had perhaps the best intuition of what was to come. But its inventors thought of it mainly as a replacement for vacuum tubes, which were used as amplifiers and switches in telephone equipment, radios, and most other electronic devices. It was obvious at the time that Bardeen and Brattain’s unwieldy contraption represented a breakthrough in electronics.
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