History of transistors. Petrels of the Silicon Revolution
VLADIMIR GAKOV, journalist, science fiction writer, lecturer. Graduated from the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. Worked at the Research Institute. Since 1984 on creative work. In 1990-1991 . – Associate Professor, Central Michigan University. Since 2003 he has been teaching at the Academy of National Economy. Author of 8 books and over 1000 publications
History of transistors
Petrels of the Silicon Revolution
A ludicrous mistake led to a discovery that earned its authors the Nobel Prize
More than sixty years ago, on December 23, 1947, three American physicists, William Shockley, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, demonstrated to their colleagues a new device - a semiconductor amplifier, or transistor. It was smaller, cheaper, stronger and more durable than radio tubes, and in addition, it consumed much less energy. In a word, the discovery was a real Christmas gift from three "Santa Clauses" to mankind - it was from this main element of integrated circuits that the Great Silicon Revolution began, which led to the emergence of "personal computers" generally accepted today.
All three received the well-deserved Nobel Prize, and Bardeen subsequently managed to get a second one - in 1972, for the creation of the microscopic theory of superconductivity (together with Leon Cooper and John Schrieffer - much lower). The fate of William Shockley was generally very curious.
Technological Progress Booster
The history of the invention of semiconductor amplifiers - transistors - turned out to be dramatic, despite its transience. All of it fit in two post-war decades, but what was not in it! Here are the amazing “flights” of the competitors of the lucky trio: being literally centimeters from the discovery, they did not see it and passed by, including by the Nobel Prize that shone for them. The students absorbed the teacher's ideas so well that they almost left him without the aforementioned Nobel Prize, so that the frustrated boss had to do the impossible in a week to catch up with his overly nimble team. Yes, and the transistor itself was born, as it often happened, as a result of a ridiculous mistake by one of the heroes of this story, exhausted by a long streak of failures. And, finally, the no less striking “blindness” of the mass media, which reported on one of the main technological revolutions of the 20th century ... in small print on the last pages!
The fate of the two participants in the historical event is dramatic. Having lost interest in the gold mine they discovered, both switched to other directions. But Bardeen, as already mentioned, received a second Nobel Prize (there were enough of them in this story), and Shockley received public indignation and ignorance of the entire scientific community. Before that, he still managed to lose his best employees. Having escaped from his firm and created their own, they became rich and famous as the creators of the first integrated circuits.
This is not an article - a fascinating novel to write just right!
But everything is in order. So, by the middle of the last century, the question of replacing bulky, capricious, energy-intensive and short-lived vacuum tubes with something more miniature and efficient was on the agenda. Several scientists and entire research groups were simultaneously selected to solve this problem.
Although it all started even earlier - in 1833, when the Englishman Michael Faraday discovered that the electrical conductivity of silver sulfide increases when heated. Nearly a century later, in 1926, Faraday's compatriot Julius Edgar Lilienfield received a patent entitled "Method and Apparatus for Controlling Electric Currents", actually anticipating, but never building, the transistor. And at the end of World War II, specialists from the research firm Bell Telephone Laboratories, headquartered in Murray Hills, New Jersey, took up the study of the electrical conductive properties of semiconductor materials.
It was there, under the leadership of the prominent theorist William Shockley, that one of the first "think tanks" in the history of American science was created. Even before the war, Shockley tried to solve the problem of increasing the conductivity of semiconductors using an external electric field. The sketch of the device in the scientist's work journal for 1939 was very reminiscent of the current field-effect transistor, but the tests then ended in failure.
By the end of the war, many of Shockley's colleagues and, most importantly, potential customers and investors, big business and the defense industry, had time to believe in semiconductors. They were impressed by the radars built during the war, which were based on semiconductor detectors.
First of all, Shockley invited a former schoolmate, theorist John Bardeen, to Murray Hills, luring him away from the university in a simple way: he offered twice the salary. In addition to the two of them, the group included five more specialists: a theorist, two experimenters, a physical chemist and an electronics engineer. The captain of this team of scientists set them the same task that he had fought before the war.
However, the second attempt also led to a negative result: even strong external fields could not change the electrical conductivity of semiconductor silicon wafers. True, this time Bardeen, who worked in conjunction with the experimenter Walter Brattain, with whom he managed to make friends back in college (where they were united not only by work, but also by a common hobby - golf), was able to at least explain the reason for the failure.
Without going into technical details, it followed from the theory of the so-called surface states that he created that the control metal plates, with which scientists acted on a semiconductor sample, could not give the desired effect. To obtain a positive result, they should have been replaced with pointed (needle) electrodes.
Friends and colleagues did just that, and again nothing. It seemed that things had come to a standstill, but then the finished workaholic Brattain, about whom they said that he could turn the oscilloscope knobs for 25 hours a day (“if only he had someone to chat with”), suddenly broke down and made an unforgivable mistake for a professional. What he closed wrong there and what poles he mixed up, only a specialist physicist is able to understand and appreciate, for the rest of humanity, the result of that unfortunate mistake, which has become truly golden, is important. Having connected the electrode in the wrong place, Brattain was surprised to record a sharp increase in the input signal: the semiconductor worked!
Failed Premiere
The first to immediately appreciate the beauty of the mistake made was Bardeen. Together with Brattain, he continued moving in the "wrong" direction, starting to experiment with a crystal of germanium, which had more resistance than silicon. And on December 16, 1947, friends showed the rest of the group the first semiconductor amplifier, later called a point transistor.
It was an ugly-looking germanium bar with twisted electrode tendrils protruding from it. How exactly it works, at that time, obviously, only Bardin understood: the hypothesis put forward by him in hot pursuit of the objection (emission) of charges by one electrode (emitter) and their collection by another electrode (collector) was listened to by colleagues in bewildered silence. The specialists could be understood - Bardeen had to wait years for confirmation of the theoretical correctness.
The official presentation of the new device took place a week later, on Christmas Tuesday, December 23, and this date went down in history as the day the transistor effect was discovered. The entire top management of Bell Telephone Laboratories was present, immediately appreciating what mountains the new invention promises the company - especially in radio communications and telephony.
Only the head of the group, consumed by jealousy, was in a gloomy mood. Shockley considered himself the author of the idea of the transistor, he was the first to teach his successful students the basics of the quantum theory of semiconductors - however, no patent bureau, with all their desire, would have seen his direct contribution to the creation of the first working transistor even through a magnifying glass.
Doubly unfair was the fact that Shockley, before others, appreciated the absolutely fantastic prospects that the transistor promised in another area - rapidly progressing computer technology. The Nobel Prize was definitely on the way, and Shockley, who had ambition and morbid pride, made a fantastic leap to catch the departing train. Literally in a week, the scientist created the theory of injection and a more thorough than Barda theory of the transistor - the so-called theory of p-n junctions. And on New Year's Eve, when colleagues examined mostly champagne bottles left over from the Christmas festivities, he came up with another type of transistor - planar (it is also called "sandwich").
The heroic efforts of the ambitious Shockley were not in vain - eight years later, he, along with Bardeen and Brattain, shared the coveted Nobel Prize. At the celebrations in Stockholm, by the way, the whole trio got together for the last time and never met in full force again.
Six months after the successful premiere of the transistor, a press presentation of the new amplifier took place in the New York office of the company. However, the reaction of the media, contrary to expectations, was more than sluggish. On one of the last pages (46th) of The New York Times of July 1, 1948, a short note appeared in the Radio News section - and that was it. The message clearly did not draw on a world sensation - since the end of June, all the American and world media have been busy discussing other news - the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, which began a week before the presentation of the transistor. The invention of the three scientists faded against the backdrop of reports about the "air bridge", through which the Americans delivered food and other essentials to the blockaded sector of Berlin.
Initially, Bell Telephone Laboratories had to give out licenses for transistors to everyone without bargaining. Demand was low - at that time, investors, by inertia, were still investing a lot of money in conventional radio tubes, the production of which was booming. However, there were loners who quickly recognized the possibilities of new solid-state amplifiers, primarily in an unexpected area - hearing aids.
Microelectronics and macroeugenics
Among others, another future Nobel laureate was present at the New York presentation - at that time an engineer at a small Centralab firm, Jack St. Clair Kilby. Inspired by what he saw, he set up in his company the production of the world's first miniature transistor hearing aids. And in May 1958, Kilby moved to Dallas and went to work at Texas Instruments, which produced transistors, capacitors, resistors and other "cubes" from which electrical circuits are assembled.
When most of the employees went on vacation over the summer, Kilby was left to sweat in the office as a newcomer. Among other things, he had to deal with routine work related more to business than to physics. It was during the analysis of the pricing of semiconductor production that the scientist was visited by a brilliant idea, basically purely economic. It turned out that in order to bring the production of semiconductors to the level of profitability, the company should have limited itself to the release of them alone. And all other active elements of the circuit should be made on the basis of the same semiconductor, and already connected into a single compact structure like a Lego children's game! Kilby just figured out how to do it.
The company's management was delighted with the employee's idea and immediately "loaded" him with an urgent task: to build an experimental model of a circuit made entirely of a semiconductor. On August 28, 1958, Kilby demonstrated a working prototype of a trigger, after which he began to manufacture the first monolithic integrated circuit (phase-shift generator) on a germanium crystal.
The first in the history of the simplest microchip the size of a paper clip earned on September 12, and this day also went down in history. However, Jack Kilby had to wait almost half a century for the Nobel Prize - the scientist received it in the last year of the 20th century, sharing the prize with his compatriot, a native of Germany Herbert Kremer and Russian colleague Zhores Alferov.
As for the personal and professional fates of the three fathers of the transistor, they developed in different ways. Bardeen, whom the jealous to the point of paranoia Shockley began to frankly "overwrite", left Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1951 and went to work at the University of Illinois at Urbana. An additional stimulus was an annual salary of $10,000, which was rare in those days. Five years later, Professor Bardeen, who had already forgotten about semiconductors and switched to quantum systems, heard on the radio that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize. And in 1972, as already mentioned, for the microscopic theory of superconductivity created together with colleagues Leon Cooper and John Schrieffer, he received a second one. The only two-time Nobel Prize winner in history (in the same nomination!) Died in 1991 at the age of 82.
For Walter Brattain, who died four years earlier, the point transistor remained the pinnacle of his scientific career.
But their leader, William Shockley, even after receiving the award, actively worked in various fields, although he soon abandoned transistors. It is curious that from a technological and commercial point of view, his planar transistor turned out to be more promising than the Bardeen and Brattain point transistor: the latter lasted on the market only until the end of the 1950s, while planar transistors are still being produced today. And it was on their basis that the first microcircuits were created.
But most of all, Shockley became famous in a field very far from physics. And according to many, and from science in general. In the mid-1960s, he suddenly became interested in eugenics, causing many unpleasant associations with Aryan superhumans, inferior races, and similar "hello" from the recent past. Shockley developed his own modification of eugenics - dysgenics. This theory speaks of the inevitable mental degradation of humanity, in which, over time, the intellectual elite (people with high IQ) is washed out, and their place is taken by those whose lack of intelligence is compensated by an excess of reproductive function. In other words, more prolific and more stupid.
A sober-minded person could still agree with the idea of a general stupidity of mankind - in principle. However, Shockley added a racial element to his reasoning, writing down among the more prolific and more stupid representatives of the black and yellow races, who, in his opinion, have a lower IQ than whites from birth. The American physicist did not stop there and, in the spirit of the ever-memorable Nazi recipes, offered his final solution - only not to the Jewish, but to the Negro question. In order to prevent the rapidly proliferating and mentally undeveloped "blacks" (as well as the "yellows" and weak-minded "whites") from finally pushing the highly intelligent white elite to the sidelines of history, the latter should encourage the former to voluntary sterilization.
Shockley's plan, which he repeatedly presented to the American Academy of Sciences and government agencies, provided financial incentives for people with low IQ who agreed to voluntary sterilization.
One can imagine the reaction of Shockley's colleagues to such revelations. In the 1960s, there was no need to talk about total political correctness in America, but outright racism was no longer in vogue. And when such ideas were presented by a professor and a Nobel laureate, the result could only be shock and indignation. Complete obstruction by the intellectual elite followed Shockley until his last days (he died of cancer in 1989).
Geeks of Silicon Valley
Meanwhile, the history of the invention of the transistor did not end there. Circles from the historical event that occurred in December 1947 diverged for a long time, sometimes leading to completely unpredictable results.
In fairness, the mentioned trio of Nobel laureates in 2000 - Kilby, Kremer and Alferov - should have been joined by the American Robert Noyce, who created the first microcircuit at the same time as Kilby. And most importantly - regardless of it. However, Noyce did not live to see the end of the century, and, as you know, this prize is not awarded posthumously.
But it is interesting that the first impetus to Noyce's scientific career was given by the same Shockley - even before he finally "moved" on racial grounds. In 1955, the future Nobel laureate left Bell Telephone Laboratories and founded his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratories, in the southern suburbs of San Francisco, Palo Alto, where he spent his childhood. So the first stone was laid in the foundation of the legendary Silicon (or Silicon) Valley.
Shockley recruited employees from young, but early, without thinking about either their ambitions or the limits of their patience - he had a disgusting character, and he showed himself to be no leader. Less than two years later, the psychological climate in the firm was fraught with an explosion, and eight of the best employees, led by Noyce and Gordon Moore, fled to start their own company.
The G8 of traitors (as Shockley branded them) had more than enough brilliant ideas - which cannot be said about start-up capital. Friends-companions of the unborn company began to go to banks and investors in search of money. And after several refusals, we happily stumbled upon the same young and ambitious financier Arthur Rock, whose strong point was just attracting investments. What exactly the technical engineers “sang” to the businessman is unknown to history, but, be that as it may, he played a truly fateful role in their future business. And also in the fate of other companies in Silicon Valley, the founders of which at the start did not have a penny for their souls - only brilliant ideas and projects.
With the help of Rock, the local company Fairchild Camera & Instrument agreed to invest $1.5 million in the new business, but on one condition: it would have the right to buy out the G8 company for twice as much in the future - if things go uphill for them. Thus was created the company Fairchild Semiconductor, whose name literally translates as "Wonder Child Semiconductor" (in German - a child prodigy). And the geeks from Palo Alto soon made themselves known.
Noyce considered himself an excellent lazybones. And he made the main invention of life, in his own words, also out of laziness. He was tired of watching how, in the manufacture of micromodules, silicon wafers were first cut into separate transistors, and then again connected to each other into a single circuit. The process was labor intensive (all joints were soldered by hand under a microscope) and expensive. And in 1958, Noyce finally figured out how to isolate individual transistors in a crystal from each other. Thus, the familiar microcircuits were born - plates with a graphic labyrinth of "tracks" made of aluminum coatings, separated from each other by an insulating material.
At first, microcircuits hardly made their way to the market. But in the early 1970s, everything changed dramatically: after Fairchild Superconductor sold a certain type of microchip in 1969 (predicted by Bardeen while working at Bell Telephone Laboratories) for $15 million. Two years later, sales of the same product jumped to $100 million .
However, the successes of the “wunderkinds” overshadowed the usual priority squabbles in such cases. The fact is that Jack Kilby applied for a patent for the microcircuit in February 1959, and Noyce did it only five months later. Nevertheless, he received a patent first - in April 1961, and Kilby - only three years later. After that, a ten-year "priority war" broke out between the competitors, ending in a settlement agreement: the US Court of Appeals confirmed Noyce's claims to primacy in technology, but at the same time decided to consider Kilby the creator of the first working microcircuit.
Robert Noyce did not live to see his rightful Nobel Prize in 2000 for exactly ten years - at the age of 63 he died in his office from a heart attack.
But before that, he founded another famous company with Moore. After leaving their established business at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968, the friends decided to name their new offspring simply: Moore Noyce. However, in English it sounded more than ambiguous - almost like more noise (“more noise”), and the partners settled on a more official, but meaningful name: Integrated Electronics. Then their company changed its name several times, and today every user of "personal computers" daily sees its logo with its current name, short and sonorous - Intel. Which is "inside".
Thus, two decades after the discovery of Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, the Great Silicon Revolution ended.
Application
convention breaker
In the case of John Bardeen, the members of the Swedish Academy for the first and so far only time in more than a century of Nobel Prizes have violated its statute. One of its points prohibits awarding awards twice to the water nomination. However, it would be simply indecent to note the success of Bardeen's employees (obvious to the members of the committee and the entire world scientific community), and at the same time to ignore the main hero of the occasion, and the American physicist was made an exception.
Obviously not a sensation...
“Yesterday, Bell Telephone Laboratories demonstrated for the first time a device it invented called a “transistor”, which in some cases can be used in the field of radio engineering instead of vacuum tubes. The device was used in the circuit of a radio receiver that did not contain ordinary lamps, as well as in a telephone system and a television device. In all cases, the device worked as an amplifier, although the company claims that it can also be used as a generator capable of creating and transmitting radio waves. The transistor, shaped like a small metal cylinder about 13 millimeters long, is not at all like ordinary lamps, it has no cavity from which air is pumped out, no mesh, no anode, no glass case. The transistor turns on almost instantly, without requiring warm-up, since it does not have a filament. The working elements of the device are only two thin wires, connected to a piece of semiconductor the size of a pinhead, soldered to a metal base. A semiconductor amplifies the current supplied to it through one wire, and the other diverts the amplified current.
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