Introduction At the beginning of the 20th century there were major advancements in vacuum tube technology that allowed scientists to use vacuum tubes for more than just light. These tubes were used to control electronic circuits in place of actual metal contact switches or relays. As scientists and engineers started doing more and more with these vacuum tubes they were able to start building simple computers with them. They were also used to build the very first internal working of the telephone system in America [1]. With all these advancements research engineers continued to come up with new ways to improve the electronic components they had designed. The only problem was vacuum tunes took up a lot of space and they used a lot of power. It took a lot of effort to keep them powered up and cooled off. A basic calculator using vacuum tubes could take up a 50ft by 30ft room and generate 150kilowatts of heat [2]. The engineers needed a component that could do the same thing but be a fraction of the size of a vacuum tube and use a lot less energy. The issue of size and energy use is what we called the “tyranny of numbers” [3]. This phrase was coined by Jack Morton and explained the issue of engineers knowing they could do so much more, but they were limited by the size and technology of the equipment. Some engineers already had designs ready for the day that something would replace the vacuum tubes that were taking up all that room and burning all that power.
Various types of vacuum tubes
The Birth of The Transistor Bell Laboratories was at the for front of technology and had a lot of break troughs happen in its various facilities. One of, if not the most important, was the bipolar transistor developed by William Shockley [4]. Shockley was the group leader over the Solid-State Physics group. The group had developed some promising components using germanium prior to the break thorough of the Bipolar Junction Transistor or BJT. This was what really got everything going in other areas of technology. With this and some other small components a pocket transistor radio was now possible. Radios had always been large clunky things that were not portable in fear of breaking one of the expense tubes inside it. More and more engineers were looking at the possibilities that were now in front of them.
Transistor inventors William Shockley (seated), John Bardeen (in glasses), and Walter Brattain in a 1948 Bell Labs publicity photo. Courtesy: AT&T.
The first Transistor
Silicon Transistors and the Integrated Circuit Texas Instruments(TI), a large electronics firm, was eager to get into the business of selling transistors commercially. The only problem was where they were going to get a large amount of Germanium. Germanium is not found in high deposits around the world. The engineers needed something they could get their hands on more readily and all they had to do is go up one element on the periodical chart. Morris Tanenbaum, a research engineer at Bell Laboratories knew that Silicon shares a lot of properties with germanium and they both belong to the group of elements called semiconductors. Through some trial and error, Tanenbaum got a silicon transistor running in 1954 [4]. TI was ready to start selling transistors and since silicon can be found anywhere you have dirt or sand they were not in short supply of raw materials. As TI sold more and more transistors the technology started to grow and grow. When president John F. Kennedy announced in 1961 that he was giving America the goal of sending a man to the moon by the end of the century it opened the flood gates of demand and research into transistors. The military was developing all sorts of new equipment that needed transistors to make their equipment smaller and more robust. Both the military and NASA needed a lot of transistors to populate the circuit boards of their equipment and manned spacecraft. As soon as it got too difficult to build these circuit boards reliably with all these components on it, NASA started looking for a more reliable solution. Trying to get multiple components on to one chip became the next hurdle to overcome. Even though there would be a decades long patent battle over who did it first, Jack Kilby form TI would be credited with the first development of the integrated circuit [5]. These integrated circuits would allow you to build multiple circuits on to one silicon chip. Robert Noyce of Fairchild semiconductor would be the next to develop an integrated circuit and the two companies would battle for years only to split the licensing rights over integrated circuit. These chips were the next step and would form technology into what it is today. They would become so intricate and so specialized that electrical engineers today are now faced with the same problem again of trying to fit more into less.
At the beginning of the 20th century there were major advancements in vacuum tube technology that allowed scientists to use vacuum tubes for more than just light. These tubes were used to control electronic circuits in place of actual metal contact switches or relays. As scientists and engineers started doing more and more with these vacuum tubes they were able to start building simple computers with them. They were also used to build the very first internal working of the telephone system in America [1]. With all these advancements research engineers continued to come up with new ways to improve the electronic components they had designed. The only problem was vacuum tunes took up a lot of space and they used a lot of power. It took a lot of effort to keep them powered up and cooled off. A basic calculator using vacuum tubes could take up a 50ft by 30ft room and generate 150kilowatts of heat [2]. The engineers needed a component that could do the same thing but be a fraction of the size of a vacuum tube and use a lot less energy. The issue of size and energy use is what we called the “tyranny of numbers” [3]. This phrase was coined by Jack Morton and explained the issue of engineers knowing they could do so much more, but they were limited by the size and technology of the equipment. Some engineers already had designs ready for the day that something would replace the vacuum tubes that were taking up all that room and burning all that power.
The Birth of The Transistor
Bell Laboratories was at the for front of technology and had a lot of break troughs happen in its various facilities. One of, if not the
most important, was the bipolar transistor developed by William Shockley [4]. Shockley was the group leader over the Solid-State Physics group. The group had developed some promising components using germanium prior to the break thorough of the Bipolar Junction Transistor or BJT. This was what really got everything going in other areas of technology. With this and some other small components a pocket transistor radio was now possible. Radios had always been large clunky things that were not portable in fear of breaking one of the expense tubes inside it. More and more engineers were looking at the possibilities that were now in front of them.
Silicon Transistors and the Integrated Circuit
Texas Instruments(TI), a large electronics firm, was eager to get into the business of selling transistors commercially. The only problem was where they were going to get a large amount of Germanium. Germanium is not found in high deposits around the world. The engineers needed something they could get their hands on more readily and all they had to do is go up one element on the periodical chart. Morris Tanenbaum, a research engineer at Bell Laboratories knew that Silicon shares a lot of properties with germanium and they both belong to the group of elements called semiconductors. Through some trial and error, Tanenbaum got a silicon transistor running in 1954 [4]. TI was ready to start selling transistors and since silicon can be found anywhere you have dirt or sand they were not in short supply of raw materials. As TI sold more and more transistors the technology started to grow and grow. When president John F. Kennedy announced in 1961 that he was giving America the goal of sending a man to the moon by the end of the century it opened the flood gates of demand and research into transistors. The military was developing all sorts of new equipment that needed transistors to make their equipment smaller and more robust. Both the military and NASA needed a lot of transistors to populate the circuit boards of their equipment and manned spacecraft. As soon as it got too difficult to build these circuit boards reliably with all these components on it, NASA started looking for a more reliable solution. Trying to get multiple components on to one chip became the next hurdle to overcome. Even though there would be a decades long patent battle over who did it first, Jack Kilby form TI would be credited with the first development of the integrated circuit [5]. These integrated circuits would allow you to build multiple circuits on to one silicon chip. Robert Noyce of Fairchild semiconductor would be the next to develop an integrated circuit and the two companies would battle for years only to split the licensing rights over integrated circuit. These chips were the next step and would form technology into what it is today. They would become so intricate and so specialized that electrical engineers today are now faced with the same problem again of trying to fit more into less.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube
[2] https://www.britannica.com/technology/ENIAC
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_numbers
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor
[5] http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/kilbyctr/jackbuilt.shtml