Transistors Explained - How transistors work.
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power. Transistors are one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semiconductor material, usually with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals controls the current through another pair of terminals. A transistor can amplify a signal because the controlled (output) power can be higher than the controlling (input) power. Today, some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.
Austro-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld proposed a field-effect transistor in 1926, but it was not possible to actually construct a working device at that time. The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement. The most widely used transistor type is the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), which Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. Transistors revolutionized electronics and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things.
Most transistors are made from pure silicon and some from germanium, but certain other semiconductor materials are sometimes used. In a field-effect transistor, a transistor may have only one kind of charge carrier or two kinds of charge carriers in bipolar junction transistor devices. Compared with the vacuum tube, transistors are generally smaller and require less power to operate. Certain vacuum tubes have advantages over transistors at very high operating frequencies or high operating voltages. Many types of transistors are made to standardized specifications by multiple manufacturers.
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