The two types of standard transistors are PNP and NPN which differs in circuit symbols. The layers of semiconductor material used to make the transistor are denoted by the letters. To keep a straight ...

The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

In the early days, PNP bipolar transistors were common, but the bulk of circuits you see today use NPN transistors. As [Aaron Danner] points out, many people think PNP transistors are “backward” but ...

In the beginning, there was the point-contact transistor. This was the very first transistor ever made, built by Walter Brattain with the help of John Bardeen. It was made of two gold foil contacts ...

In 1964, when I started working in the electronics industry, a single silicon transistor cost over £1 ($2.80 at the time, or about $22 at 2014 prices). These cheap ones were not very good and higher ...

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Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stanford University, and the University of Texas at Dallas have managed to build a transistor gate that is only 1 nanometer in length. Their ...