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The Transistor's 60th Birthday
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Dec 16, 2007 05:46 AM
from the silly-hats-will-be-worn dept.
from the silly-hats-will-be-worn dept.
Apple Acolyte sends in a Forbes piece noting the 60th birthday of the transistor on Dec, 16. For the occasion the AP provides the obligatory Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article. From Forbes: "Sixty years ago, on Dec. 16, 1947, three physicists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., built the world's first transistor. William Shockley, John Bardeen and William Brattain had been looking for a semiconductor amplifier to take the place of the vacuum tubes that made radios and other electronics so impossibly bulky, hot and power hungry."
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The hell? (Score:5, Funny)
This post is at least 5 minutes old and no comments?
Either no one cares about the poor transistor, or you've all gotten lives.
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Anybody who has held a soldering iron and done something digital with single transistors please raise your hand ? Vacuum tubes ? Relays ?
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Anybody who has held a soldering iron and done something digital with single transistors please raise your hand ? Vacuum tubes ? Relays ?
One hand raised way up here.
Fanciest thing I ever did was a capacitance measuring device. Mostly used op-amps though IIRC there was a single discrete BJT in it as well. It was a really wierd device in the end though. You had to connect the leads of the capacitor and press a start button for the device to start measuring it. The idea was to use a constant current source to charge the capacitor up to a set voltage. So with voltage and charging current being constant, the capacitance value was proportional
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In between I worked on organic transistors, normal silicon transistors, high-k devices.. you name it.
Re:The hell? (Score:4, Funny)
It was all part of an electronics toy set called "Electronic Engineering", where you could build various gadgets by connecting components in predefined ways. Very cool, but unfortunately I was far too young to understand what I was doing. Still it did capture my attention and speed me on the road to geekdom.
Parent
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They came with booklets that had 150 (o
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That kit is almost identical to my 200-in-1 kit. They moved the batteries up topside and added binding posts but that's the one. There is NO BETTER way to teach kids about electronics. The link on radio shack's page should be named "15-in-1 kit". Doesn't look like there's enough to make jack with it. I wonder how many projects are in that book they ship with it.
They must have bought it from Tandy. Nice, they even posted a list of the 20
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Almost all of my digital electronics projects include at least one discrete transistor. Quite often, you need an open collector/open drain output from a chip, but it doesn't actually provide one - a single mosfet will do the job (maybe two if you need it to not be inverted). Very often you need to switch
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The fact that you can use a transistor in two modes, as a switch where you basically saturate the device to get minimum 'on' resistance and maximum switching speed vs an analogue mode where you aim for the linear part in the curve is of course totally obvious, but you can actually just use transistors in the 'digital'
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Maybe you didn't read the article you linked to: "In 1981 he filed a libel suit against the Atlanta Constitution after a reporter called him a "Hitlerite" and compared his racial views to the Nazis. Shockley won the suit"
Re:The hell? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley#Beliefs_about_populations_and_genetics [wikipedia.org]
It's sad that when someone applies scientific principles to a politically charged situation they're framed as a bigot.
It is true that unskilled, poor, unintelligent people have more children. They simply have more time on their hands and less grasp of the consequences children will have on their lifestyle and they tend to have less access (voluntarily or financially) to proper modern birth control methods and hey, when you've got a lot of time on your hand sex is a great passtime!
Shockley did conclude through his research that this happens more with black families than with whites, however he proposed that all people with sub-100 IQs (no further qualification) should be paid for voluntary sterilization.
His ideas while radical at the time have been tossed around for decades. It is widely held that uneducated, unskilled people who do either no or menial labour greatly increase the chances that their children will do much of the same later in life. It's why ghetto-style atmospheres tend to be cyclical and highly self-supporting. It's also why people who "escape" from that life are notable exceptions.
The man was a scientist and one who contributed one of the most pivotal pieces of our way of life to date. That's not something that should be undermined by a piece of socio-politically charged research that he did besides.
Then again there's almost always two sides to every major scientific discovery. Einstein gave us atomic energy but he also gave us atomic weapons (for which I understand he was forever mournful). Shockley gave us something that revolutionized the way we live, work and play but he also inadvertently gave us spam and script kiddies and phishing and 419 scams and and and ... :P
Parent
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As every audiophile knows... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:As every audiophile knows... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:As every audiophile knows... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually related to one of the major reasons: Power Handling. Vacuum tubes are still used for High Power transmitter amplifiers, much greater than 1kw.
Also: The "Virtual Tube" DSP amps do not sound the same, regardless of what a tone-deaf Electrical Engineer says. Musicians are "Audiophiles" in the derogatory sense you intend, although they usually audiophiles in the true sense of being lovers of sound and music. They may not know EE, but that doesn't mean they don't know anything. Skilled musicians DO know music, and there is a reason they prefer tube amps for Guitars, Bass, etc.
Parent
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Every audiophile knows... (Score:2)
Would you like an oxygen-free, 99.999% pure woven copper blindfold and gold-plated cigarette?
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Copper? Don't make me laugh. Every audiophool knows that you need silver. And not just any silver, but pure isotope 109 silver (its higher density makes the sound flow better).
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That's more likely because the DSP wasn't programmed properly. A transistor *should* in theory be able to replicate any sound within its frequency range. My guess is that the DSPs aren't correctly accounting for distortions caused by the tubes.
On the other hand, "pro sound" tends to shy away from tube amps these days, because transistor amps have gotten good enough not to be noticeably differen
Re:As every audiophile knows... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and that reason is marketing. Pure, simple, intensive marketing. Lots and lots of marketing being fed to them throughout their life. Fender and Gibson make the best guitars, Marshal makes the best amps and tubes are better than solid state amps. That's what is constantly being fed to them through implicit and explicit marketing campaigns. Yet, no one can rationally explain why are they better than the others, besides the huge price tag that comes attached to those products and the fact that "OMG my guitar hero uses one of those so it must be excellent.
On the other hand, Brian May made his career playing a guitar that was made from wood taken from a fireplace and some bike parts and it sounds better than any 2.5k euro guitars out there. Makes you think. Or at least it should.
Parent
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Re:As every camper knows... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a taste for everything, but there's no denying that transistors make sound that's closer to the original, same as a hotel room is closer to the room where you (OK, most people...) sleep at home.
Actually, one of the tube amplifiers biggest shortcomings, its high distortion, is one of the reasons why tubes are still used for a niche application: guitar amplifiers. The distortion caused by the tubes has
Re:As every camper knows... (Score:5, Funny)
Right up until the next morning when you wish you had a hot shower and room service.
Parent
not entirely (Score:2, Interesting)
Not really-- if you're AMD, Moore's Law and Murphy's Law are kind of becoming the same thing [infoworld.com].
rewritten history (Score:5, Insightful)
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld [wikipedia.org]. Due to his patents many claims by Bell Labs were thrown out.
The device that was invented by Bell Labs in 1947 was a point contact transistor. An inherently fragile device not fit for mass production. The same device was invented in parallel in France by two german Scientists: Welker and Matere see here [wikipedia.org].
Schockley himself did however invent the bipolar junction transistor a couple of years later. This invention was truly a streak of genius as it is the most complex of all devices.
So, thanks to american corporate giants history was rewritten again.
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If I recall correctly Lilienfeld never actually constructed the transistor. So I think it is safe to say it is the 60th anniversary of the first physically-existent transistor and not the 60th anniversary of the idea of a transistor.
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You mean without Teal? But that is for Silicon devices.
ITT Intermetall did manage to mass produce transistors without any license or technology transfer from Bell labs in the late 40ies...
The Transisor's Significance (Score:5, Interesting)
While you read this post, about 20 transistors were manufactured for every person in the world.
Re:The Transisor's Significance (Score:4, Funny)
Feel free to send me my 20 whenever you get the chance. What sort of transistors are these? MOSFETs? BJTs? N-channel, P-channel? I like them all.
Parent
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Although I'm sure you're joking, the number of transistors manufactured as discrete components (ie. something big enough to pick up and solder to a circuit board) is insignificantly small compared to the total number manufactured (most of which are "printed" onto an IC).
For instance, a quad-core pentium contains 820 million transistors, which makes me think that th
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It's a little hard to put the importance of the transistor into perspective. One way of looking at it is about 3 billion transistors are made worldwide - a second. Imagine how different the world would be if these transistors were still made manually with vacuum tubes (or not made at all.)
That must be discrete transistors, as a modern day AMD X2 has over 200m per unit. So 3 billion transistors would only be 15 AMD X2 processors.
Imagine a AMD X2 built out of tubes, 200+ million of them. The power bill..
history of semiconductor engineering (Score:3, Informative)
Moore's-Law-is-ending, no-it-isn't article. (Score:3, Funny)
Obligatory quote from 1947 (Score:5, Funny)
iPod Nano (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Good 'ole days (Score:4, Insightful)
The transistor is part of electronics, and electronics was quite well developed by the time the transistor came along. There were already steps towards miniturization using vacuum tubes as small as 3/8" across and only about 3/4" high, which was not that much larger than the first transistors. There were plenty of tubes that carried more than one circuit within the glass enclosure, so in effect they would already be 'integrated circuits' of sorts.
The transistors main contribution was the fact that it was 'solid state', no glow current needed (so much less power consumption, which in turn allowed much further miniaturization) and the fact that they could directly switch current at voltages that could drive devices directly instead of through large bulky transformers. All the rest (thin film, the fet and so on) followed from there but are also just 'chapters' in the book of electronics.
The basics are:
- electromechanics (wiring, switches, relays)
- passive components (resistors, capacitors, coils, diodes, etc)
- active components (transistors, tubes, various variations on the transistor)
- integrated circuits (which is a subbranch of active components)
Relays, interestingly are also 'active' components in a sense.
Parent
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I would argue that one of the main contributions of the transistor was that they are not expected to wear out during normal usage. Tubes are not reliable enough to build complicated circuits (e.g. computers) for the mass market out of. Think "one tube failing every two days" like ENIAC, except repeated across millions of desktop PCs.
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Just for you I've dug you up a picture of what an early model heater would have looked like:
http://www.thevalvepage.com/valvetek/heater/fig4.gif [thevalvepage.com]
and
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> Please I urge you, you seem smart but are mysteriously stuck with many misconceptions.
So from being an idiot I now 'seem smart' ? I guess that's an improvement. Who knows where it will lead...
> Perhaps you are self-taught. Commendable, but it's never OK to just assume what you know is gospel truth; investigate and keep learning, always be ready to discard notions proven wrong.
Let me urge you a bit in return: (and btw thanks for the electron micrographs of the lightbulb, t
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These "vital relays" are made today by Union Switch and Signal [switch.com]
and Alstom [alstomsign...utions.com].
Certain applications, which by law must use safety-rated components, include relays.
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All the conspiracy theorists on the Web are really GOVERNMENT AGENTS! You're all just PRETENDING to be conspiracy theorists, to distract us so we don't notice your GREAT CONSPIRACY!
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You write this in 2007 and mention a UFO incident on 7/7 1947... Coincidence?
2 posts about this subject appear on this page, one enumerating 2 points and the other mentioning 2 dates, and these posts appear 22 minutes apart... Coincidence?
I think not. Clearly this can't be coincidence. Clearly you're an alien pretending to be a conspiracy theorist.