MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor)

What it is

Field-effect transistor with a gate insulated by silicon oxide, small, low-power and easy to mass-integrate. It is the most manufactured device in history (trillions of units).

What it led to

• Large-scale (LSI, VLSI) chips and Moore's law
• Low-power electronics: calculators, watches, mobile phones
• The CMOS technology underpinning all of today's computing

Built on

• Field-effect transistor (Lilienfeld's patent)1925 (patente)
• Bipolar junction transistor1948
• Thyristor (silicon-controlled rectifier)1956-1957
• Planar process1959
• Lilienfeld's field-effect transistor patent (1925)

Made possible

• Dynamic random-access memory (DRAM)1966
• Charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensor1969
• Microprocessor (Intel 4004)1971
• Flash memory1980-1987
• Insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT)1979-1983
• CMOS active-pixel sensor and camera phone1993-2000
• FinFET (3D transistor)2011
• DRAM memory

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