The transistor: 75 years on
February 2023
The genesis of a new age
The genesis of a new era On X-Mas Eve 1947, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain put the first bipolar transistor into operation at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, on the East Coast of the USA.
This transistor is made with 2 gold contacts (emitter and gate) placed very close together on a germanium substrate (base).
This transistor was used to make an audio amplifier with a gain of 7.
It wasn't until the early 50s that Texas Instruments produced a transistor on a silicon substrate, and 1959 that Fairchild was able to produce it on a wafer (photolithography technology then known as “planar”), opening the door to price competitive mass production.
It was in the early 70s that the first microprocessor (Intel 4004) operating at 4 bits and incorporating 2,300 transistors appeared. At the time, the engraving fineness was 10 microns, compared with a few nanometers today for the latest-generation chips, with more than 4 billion transistors for the densest chips.
How far can we go?
The ITRS (International Roadmap for Semiconductor) defines the etching finesse of each generation as (√0.5)*(etching finesse of the previous generation).
For 5nm and 3nm technologies, it's not certain that silicon substrates are still suitable, in particularbecause of their energy consumption.
TSMC, Samsung and Intel are also working on the development of other substrates such as Gallium-Indium arsenide (InGaAs) or Indium phosphorus (InP).
There's no doubt that the market is waiting for increasingly complex chips required for artificial intelligence, big data and image processing applications, to name but a few. However, the technological challenges are enormous, and the necessary investments colossal. Will Moore's Law (doubling the number of transistors on a chip every 2 years) still hold?
In any case, the future of semiconductors promises to be exciting, and gigAtec is always at your disposal for the manufacture of electronic boards using today's components.