The mind-bending advances that emerge from that conference always get him excited about the engineering feats occurring in today’s labs and on tomorrow’s production lines. IEEE’s Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco. When I was talking to Moore a few weeks ago about this issue, he mentioned that he’s attending his favorite conference just as this issue comes out, the 68th edition of

For “ The Transistor of 2047,” Moore talked to the leading lights of semiconductor engineering, many of them IEEE Fellows, to get a glimpse of a future where transistors are stacked on top of each other and are made of increasingly exotic 2D materials, even as the OG of transistor materials, germanium, is poised for a comeback in the near term. Spectrum and curated this special issue, looks at what the transistor might be like when it turns 100. The best explanation of the point-contact transistor is in Bardeen’s 1956 Nobel Prize lecture, but even that left out important details.Īnd while we’re celebrating this historic accomplishment, Senior Editor Samuel K.

According to our editorial director for content development, Glenn Zorpette, the best explanation of the point-contact transistor is in Bardeen’s 1956 Nobel Prize lecture, but even that left out important details, which Zorpette explores in classic Spectrum style in “ How the First Transistor Worked” on page 24. Spectrum special issue if we didn’t tell you how the original point-contact transistor worked, something that even the inventors seemed a little fuzzy on. It is a testament to imagination and ingenuity of three generations of electronics engineers who took the (by today’s standards) mammoth point-contact transistor and shrunk it down to the point where transistors are so ubiquitous that civilization as we know it would not exist without them. In fact, each of us is surrounded by billions, if not trillions of transistors, none of which are visible to the naked eye. What amazed me most besides the fact that the very thing this issue is devoted to was here with us? I’d passed by it countless times and never noticed it, even though it is tens of billions times the size of an ordinary transistor today. This article is part of our special report on theħ5th anniversary of the invention of the transistor.

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