Bipolar junction transistor
Transistor bipolar de unión
- Date
- 1948 · confidence high
- Place
- Bell Labs, Murray Hill, New Jersey, United States
- Credited to
- William Shockley (Bell Labs); manufactured by Morgan Sparks and Gordon Teal in 1951
- People
- 👤 William Bradford Shockley1910–1989
- Field
- Matter & energy
What it is
Transistor based on p-n junctions grown in a single crystal, more rugged and reproducible than the point-contact type. It was the first mass-manufacturable transistor.
What it led to
- Industrial semiconductor production and Bell's licensing to Sony, TI and others
- The founding of Shockley Semiconductor and, by spin-off, Fairchild and Intel
- High-reliability silicon electronics for missiles and satellites
Built on
- Copper-oxide rectifier (Grondahl)1926
- The p-n junction in semiconductors1940
- The transistor effect1947
- The transistor effect
- single-crystal growth (Czochralski method)
Made possible
- Darlington transistor1953
- Silicon photovoltaic solar cell1954
- Transistor radio1954
- Thyristor (silicon-controlled rectifier)1956-1957
- Integrated circuit (Kilby)1958
- Planar process1959
- MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor)1959
- Brushless DC motor1962
- Synthesizer (Moog)1964
- Minicomputer (DEC PDP-8)1965
- Quartz wristwatch (Seiko Astron)1969
- transistorised computers