Transistor
lastmod 2018-08-17created 2016-05-141 edits
A transistor is a semiconductor device that performs amplification and switching. It was first made in 1948 at Bell Labs in the United States by Walter Brattain, William Shockley, and John Bardeen. The word is a coinage from "transfer of a signal through a varister or transit resistor".
The transistor is one of the most common basic components of modern electronic devices. After the transistor was developed in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, it brought about a great revolution in electronics. The advent of the transistor led to the development of smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, computers, etc. The transistor is listed among the IEEE Milestones, and its developers received the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Transistors are broadly divided into bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) and field-effect transistors (FETs). A transistor usually consists of an input terminal, a common terminal, and an output terminal. Applying a voltage (FET) or current (BJT) between the input and common terminals increases the electrical conductivity between the common and output terminals, which controls the current flow between them. In analog and digital circuits, transistors are used to build amplifiers, switches, logic circuits, RAM, etc.