We all
read in our high-school social studies subject that industrial revolution that
took place in Great Britain had a big impact on social life of man on this
planet. Similarly another breakthrough occurred with the advent and emergence
of semiconductors, especially silicon during 20th century. TV,
mobile telephony, smart phones, Video, e-books, computers, internet etc have
made a huge impact on the way we communicate with the world.
All this
began with the first transistor that was invented by John Bardeen and Walter
Brattain while working
in Bell Laboratories. They were working with the semiconductor, silicon, to evaluate
its properties. When they observed that controlling the current on the
‘base’ connector, would
control the flow
of electrons between
the other connectors, emitter and
collector. This had a great impact on electronics, leading to more
reliable transistor to replace the vacuum tube. This resulted in progeny of a
number of ‘transistorized’ products.
Today, we have 64 bit microprocessors of which each one has 55000000 transistors performing millions of computing tasks each second.
