transistor history. The invention of transistors and the development of semiconductor electronics
The invention of the transistor, which became the most important achievement of the 20th century, is associated with the names of many remarkable scientists. About those who created and developed semiconductor electronics, and will be discussed in this article.
Exactly 50 years ago, the Americans John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley (Fig. 1) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for research in the field of semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor." Nevertheless, an analysis of the history of science clearly shows that the discovery of the transistor is not only a well-deserved success for Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley.
Rice. 1. Winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1956
First experiences
The birth of solid state electronics can be traced back to 1833. It was then that Michael Faraday (Fig. 2), experimenting with silver sulfide, discovered that the conductivity of this substance (and it was, as we now call it, a semiconductor) increases with increasing temperature, in contrast to the conductivity of metals, which in this case decreases. Why is this happening? What is it connected with? Faraday could not answer these questions.
The next milestone in the development of solid-state electronics was 1874. The German physicist Ferdinand Braun (Fig. 3), the future Nobel laureate (in 1909 he will receive the award "For his outstanding contribution to the creation of wireless telegraphy") publishes an article in the journal Analen der Physik und Chemie, in which, using the example of "natural and artificial sulfur metals ” describes the most important property of semiconductors - to conduct electric current in only one direction. The rectifying property of a semiconductor-metal contact contradicted Ohm's law. Brown (Fig. 4) tries to explain the observed phenomenon and conducts further research, but to no avail. The phenomenon is there, there is no explanation. For this reason, Brown's contemporaries were not interested in his discovery, and only five decades later the rectifying properties of semiconductors were used in detector receivers.
Rice. 3. Ferdinand Brown
Rice. 4. Ferdinand Braun in his laboratory
Year 1906. American engineer Greenleaf Witter Pickard (Fig. 5) receives a patent for a crystal detector (Fig. 6). In his patent application, he writes: "The contact between a thin metal conductor and the surface of some crystalline materials (silicon, galena, pyrite, etc.) rectifies and demodulates the high-frequency alternating current that occurs in the antenna when receiving radio waves."
Rice. 5. Greenleaf Picard
Rice. 6. Schematic diagram of Picard's crystal detector
A thin metal conductor, with the help of which contact was made with the surface of the crystal, outwardly very much resembled a cat's whisker.
Picard's crystal detector began to be called "cat's whisker".
To "breathe life" into the Picard detector and make it work stably, it was necessary to find the most sensitive point on the crystal surface. This was not easy to do. A lot of ingenious "cat's whisker" designs are born (Fig. 7), facilitating the search for the cherished point, but the rapid entry into the forefront of vacuum tube radio engineering sends the Picard detector behind the scenes for a long time.
Rice. 7. Design option "cat's whisker"
Still, the "cat's whisker" is much simpler and smaller than vacuum diodes, and much more efficient at high frequencies. But what if we replace the vacuum triode, on which all radio electronics of that time was based, (Fig. 8) with a semiconductor? Is it possible? At the beginning of the 20th century, this question haunted many scientists.
Rice. 8. Vacuum triode
Losev
Soviet Russia. 1918 By personal order of Lenin, a radio engineering laboratory is being created in Nizhny Novgorod (Fig. 9). The new government is in dire need of "wireless telegraph" communication. The best radio engineers of that time - M. A. Bonch-Bruevich, V. P. Vologdin, V. K. Lebedinsky, V. V. Tatarinov and many others are involved in the work in the laboratory.
Rice. 9. Nizhny Novgorod radio laboratory
Arrives in Nizhny Novgorod and Oleg Losev (Fig. 10).
Rice. 10. Oleg Vladimirovich Losev
After graduating from the Tver real school in 1920 and unsuccessfully entering the Moscow Institute of Communications, Losev agreed to any job, as long as he was accepted into the laboratory. They take him as a messenger. Hostels are not supposed to be messengers.
17-year-old Losev is ready to live in the laboratory, on the landing in front of the attic, if only to do what he loves.
From an early age, he was passionate about radio communication. During the First World War, a radio receiving station was built in Tver. Its tasks included receiving messages from Russia's allies in the Entente and then transmitting them by telegraph to Petrograd. Losev often visited the radio station, knew many employees, helped them and could not imagine his future life without radio engineering. In Nizhny Novgorod, he had neither a family nor a normal life, but the main thing was the opportunity to communicate with specialists in the field of radio communications, learn from their experience and knowledge. After completing the necessary work in the laboratory, he was allowed to engage in independent experimentation.
At that time there was practically no interest in crystal detectors. In the lab, no one was particularly interested in this topic. Priority in research was given to radio tubes. Losev really wanted to work independently. The prospect of getting a limited area of \u200b\u200bwork "on lamps" does not inspire him in any way. Perhaps this is the reason why he chooses a crystal detector for his research. His goal is to improve the detector, make it more sensitive and stable in operation. Starting the experiments, Losev erroneously assumed that "due to the fact that some contacts between the metal and the crystal do not obey Ohm's law, it is likely that undamped oscillations may occur in an oscillatory circuit connected to such a contact." At that time, it was already known that for self-excitation of the nonlinearity of the current-voltage characteristic alone is not enough, a falling section must necessarily be present. Any competent specialist would not expect amplification from the detector. But yesterday's schoolboy knows nothing of this. He changes the crystals, the material of the needle, accurately fixes the results and one fine day finds the desired active points in the crystals, which provide the generation of high-frequency signals.
“Everyone knows from childhood that this and that is impossible, but there is always an ignoramus who does not know this, it is he who makes the discovery,” Einstein joked.
Losev carried out his first studies of generator crystals on the simplest scheme shown in Fig. eleven.
Rice. 11. Scheme of Losev's first experiments
Having tested a large number of crystal detectors, Losev found out that zincite crystals subjected to special treatment generate vibrations best of all. To obtain high-quality materials, he develops a technology for preparing zincite by fusing natural crystals in an electric arc. With a pair of zincite - carbon tip, when a voltage of 10 V was applied, a radio signal with a wavelength of 68 m was obtained. With a decrease in generation, an amplifying detector mode is implemented.
Note that the “generating” detector was first demonstrated back in 1910 by the English physicist William Eccles (Fig. 12).
Figure 12. William Henry Eccles
A new physical phenomenon does not attract the attention of specialists, and for some time it is forgotten. Eccles also erroneously explained the mechanism of "negative" resistance on the basis that the resistance of a semiconductor decreases with increasing temperature due to thermal effects that occur at the "metal-semiconductor" interface.
In 1922, Losev's first article on an amplifying and generating detector appeared on the pages of the scientific journal Telegraphy and Telephony without Wires. In it, he describes in great detail the results of his experiments, and pays special attention to the obligatory presence of a falling section of the current-voltage characteristic of the contact.
In those years, Losev was actively engaged in self-education. His immediate supervisor, Professor V. K. Lebedinsky, helps him in the study of radiophysics. Lebedinsky understands that his young colleague has made a real discovery and is also trying to explain the observed effect, but in vain. The fundamental science of that time did not yet know quantum mechanics. Losev, in turn, puts forward the hypothesis that at a high current in the contact zone, a certain electric discharge arises like a voltaic arc, but only without heating. This discharge shorts out the high resistance of the contact, enabling generation.
It was only thirty years later that they were able to understand what actually had been discovered. Today we would say that Losev's device is a two-terminal device with an N-shaped current-voltage characteristic, or a tunnel diode, for which the Japanese physicist Leo Isaki (Fig. 13) received the Nobel Prize in 1973.
Rice. 13. Leo Isaki
The leadership of the Nizhny Novgorod laboratory understood that it would not be possible to reproduce the effect in series. After a little work, the detectors practically lost their amplification and generation properties. There was no question of abandoning the lamps. Nevertheless, the practical significance of Losev's discovery was enormous.
In the 1920s, all over the world, including in the Soviet Union, amateur radio became an epidemic. Soviet radio amateurs use the simplest detector receivers assembled according to the Shaposhnikov scheme (Fig. 14).
Rice. 14. Shaposhnikov detector receiver
High antennas are used to increase the volume and range of reception. In cities, it was difficult to use such antennas due to industrial interference. In open areas, where there is practically no interference, good reception of radio signals was not always possible due to the poor quality of the detectors. The introduction of the negative resistance of a detector with zincite into the antenna circuit of the receiver, set in a mode close to self-excitation, significantly amplified the received signals. Radio amateurs managed to hear the most distant stations. There was a marked increase in selectivity. And this is without the use of vacuum tubes!
The lamps were not cheap, and they required a special power source, and the Losev detector could operate on ordinary batteries for a flashlight.
As a result, it turned out that simple receivers designed by Shaposhnikov with generating crystals make it possible to carry out heterodyne reception, which at that time was the latest word in radio technology. In subsequent articles, Losev describes a technique for quickly searching for active points on the surface of zincite and replaces the carbon tip with a metal one. He gives recommendations on how to process crystals and gives several practical schemes for self-assembly of radio receivers (Fig. 15).
Rice. 15. Principal diagram of the kristadin by O. V. Losev
Losev's device allows not only to receive signals over long distances, but also to transmit them. Radio amateurs en masse, based on detector-generators, manufacture radio transmitters that maintain communication within a radius of several kilometers. Losev's pamphlet was soon published (Fig. 16). It is sold in millions of copies. Enthusiastic radio amateurs wrote to various popular science magazines that "with the help of a zincite detector in Tomsk, for example, one can hear Moscow, Nizhny and even foreign stations."
Rice. 16. Losev's pamphlet, 1924 edition
For all his technical solutions, Losev receives patents, starting with the “Detector receiver-heterodyne”, declared in December 1923.
Losev's articles are published in such journals as ZhETF, Doklady AN SSSR, Radio Revue, Philosophical Magazine, Physikalische Zeitschrift.
Losev becomes a celebrity, and yet he is not yet twenty years old!
For example, the editorial preface to Losev's article "Oscillating Crystals" in the American magazine The Wireless World and Radio Review of October 1924 states: "The author of this article, Mr. Oleg Losev from Russia, in a relatively short discovery of oscillatory properties in some crystals.
Another American magazine, Radio News, publishes an article at about the same time under the heading "Sensational Invention", which notes: "There is no need to prove that this is a revolutionary radio invention. We will soon be talking about a circuit with three or six crystals, as we are now talking about a circuit with three or six amplifier tubes. It will take several years for the generating crystal to be improved enough to become better than a vacuum tube, but we predict that time will come.”
The author of this article, Hugo Gernsbeck, calls Losev's solid-state receiver a kristadine (crystal + local oscillator). And not only names, but also prudently registers the name as a trademark (Fig. 17). The demand for cristadins is huge.
Rice. 17. Losev's crystal detector. Manufactured by Radio News Laboratories. USA, 1924
It is interesting that when German radio technicians come to the Nizhny Novgorod laboratory to personally get acquainted with Losev, they do not believe their eyes. They are amazed at the talent and young age of the inventor. In letters from abroad, Losev was called nothing more than a professor. No one could have imagined that the professor was just learning the basics of science. However, very soon Losev will become a brilliant experimental physicist and once again make the world talk about himself.
In the laboratory, from the position of a messenger, he is transferred to laboratory assistants and provided with housing. In Nizhny Novgorod, Losev marries (however, unsuccessfully, as it turned out later), equips his life and continues to deal with crystals.
In 1928, by decision of the government, the topics of the Nizhny Novgorod radio laboratory, together with employees, were transferred to the Central Radio Laboratory in Leningrad, which, in turn, was also constantly reorganized. At the new location, Losev continued to work on semiconductors, but soon the Central Radio Laboratory was transformed into the Institute of Broadcast Reception and Acoustics. The new institute has its own research program, the scope of work is narrowed. Laboratory assistant Losev manages to get a part-time job at the Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology (LFTI), where he has the opportunity to continue research on new physical effects in semiconductors. In the late 1920s, Losev had the idea to create a solid-state analogue of a three-electrode vacuum radio tube.
In 1929–1933, at the suggestion of A.F. Ioffe, Losev conducted research on a semiconductor device that completely repeated the design of a point transistor. As you know, the principle of operation of this device is to control the current flowing between two electrodes using an additional electrode. Losev actually observed this effect, but, unfortunately, the overall coefficient of such control did not allow obtaining signal amplification. For this purpose, Losev used only a carborundum (SiC) crystal, and not a zincite (ZnO) crystal, which had significantly better characteristics in a crystal amplifier (What is strange! Should he not know about the properties of this crystal.) Until recently, it was believed that after the forced departure From LPTI, Losev did not return to the idea of semiconductor amplifiers. However, there is a rather curious document written by Losev himself. It is dated July 12, 1939 and is currently kept in the Polytechnic Museum. This document, entitled "Biography of Oleg Vladimirovich Losev", contains, in addition to interesting facts about his life, a list of scientific results. The following lines are of particular interest: “It has been established that a three-electrode system can be built with semiconductors, similar to a triode, like a triode, giving characteristics showing negative resistance. These works are currently being prepared by me for publication…”.
Unfortunately, the fate of these works, which could completely change the idea of the history of the discovery of the transistor, the most revolutionary invention of the 20th century, has not yet been established.
Talking about the outstanding contribution of Oleg Vladimirovich Losev to the development of modern electronics, it is simply impossible not to mention his discovery of the light emitting diode.
The scale of this discovery is yet to be understood. Not much time will pass, and in every house, instead of the usual incandescent lamp, “electronic light generators”, as Losev called LEDs, will burn.
Back in 1923, while experimenting with kristadins, Losev drew attention to the glow of crystals when an electric current was passed through them. Carborundum detectors shone especially brightly. In the 1920s, in the West, the phenomenon of electroluminescence was at one time even called “Losev light” (Losev light, Lossew Licht). Losev took up the study and explanation of the obtained electroluminescence. He was the first to appreciate the enormous prospects of such light sources, emphasizing their high brightness and speed. Losev became the owner of the first patent for the invention of a light relay device with an electroluminescent light source.
In the 70s of the twentieth century, when LEDs began to be widely used, an article by the Englishman Henry Round was found in the Electronic World magazine for 1907, in which the author, being an employee of the Marconi laboratory, reported that he saw a glow in the contact of a carborundum detector when applying to it external electric field. No considerations explaining the physics of this phenomenon were given. This note did not have any impact on subsequent research in the field of electroluminescence, however, the author of the article is today officially considered the discoverer of the LED.
Losev independently discovered the phenomenon of electroluminescence and carried out a number of studies on the example of a carborundum crystal. He singled out two physically different phenomena that are observed at different voltage polarities on the contacts. His undoubted merit is the discovery of the effect of pre-breakdown electroluminescence, which he called "glow number one", and injection electroluminescence - "glow number two". Today, the effect of pre-breakdown luminescence is widely used in the creation of electroluminescent displays, and injection electroluminescence is the basis of LEDs and semiconductor lasers. Losev managed to make significant progress in understanding the physics of these phenomena long before the creation of the band theory of semiconductors. Subsequently, in 1936, the number one glow was rediscovered by the French physicist Georges Destriaux. In the scientific literature, it is known as the "Destrio effect", although Destrio himself gave priority to the discovery of this phenomenon to Oleg Losev. It would probably be unfair to dispute Round's priority in opening the LED. And yet we must not forget that Marconi and Popov are rightfully considered the inventors of radio, although everyone knows that Hertz was the first to observe radio waves. And there are many such examples in the history of science.
In his article Subhistory of Light Emitting Diode, the famous American electroluminescence scientist Egon Lobner writes about Losev: “With his pioneering research in the field of LEDs and photodetectors, he contributed to the future progress of optical communication. His research was so precise and his publications so clear that one can easily imagine now what was going on in his laboratory then. His intuitive choice and art of experimentation is simply amazing.”
Today we understand that it is impossible to imagine the development of solid-state electronics without the quantum theory of the structure of semiconductors. Therefore, Losev's talent is amazing. From the very beginning he saw the unified physical nature of kristadin and the phenomenon of injection luminescence, and in this he was far ahead of his time.
After him, research on detectors and electroluminescence was carried out separately from each other, as independent areas. An analysis of the results shows that for almost twenty years after the appearance of Losev's work, nothing new has been done in terms of understanding the physics of this phenomenon. Only in 1951, the American physicist Kurt Lehovetz (Fig. 18) established that detection and electroluminescence are of the same nature, associated with the behavior of current carriers in p-n junctions.
Rice. 18. Kurt Lechovec
It should be noted that in his work Lekhovets primarily cites Losev's work on electroluminescence.
In 1930–31 Losev carried out a series of experiments at a high experimental level with oblique sections that stretch the area under study and a system of electrodes included in the compensation measuring circuit for measuring potentials at different points of the cross section of the layered structure. By moving a metal "cat's whisker" across the section, he showed, with an accuracy of up to a micron, that the near-surface part of the crystal has a complex structure. He revealed an active layer approximately ten microns thick in which the phenomenon of injection luminescence was observed. Based on the results of the experiments, Losev made the assumption that the cause of unipolar conductivity is the difference in the conditions of electron motion on both sides of the active layer (or, as we would say today, different types of conductivity). Subsequently, experimenting with three or more electrode probes located in these areas, he really confirmed his assumption. These studies are another significant achievement of Losev as a physicist.
In 1935, as a result of another reorganization of the broadcasting institute and difficult relations with the management, Losev was left without a job. Laboratory assistant Losev was allowed to make discoveries, but not to bask in the rays of glory. And this despite the fact that his name was well known to the powerful of this world. In a letter dated May 16, 1930, Academician A.F. Ioffe writes to his colleague Paul Ehrenfest: “Scientifically, I have a number of successes. Thus, Losev obtained a glow in carborundum and other crystals under the action of electrons of 2–6 volts. The boundary of the glow in the spectrum is limited ... ".
For a long time, Losev had his own workplace at LPTI, but they don’t take him to the institute, he is too independent a person. All the work was done independently - there are no co-authors in any of them.
With the help of friends, Losev gets a job as an assistant at the Department of Physics of the First Medical Institute. At a new place, it is much more difficult for him to do scientific work, since there is no necessary equipment. Nevertheless, having set himself the goal of choosing a material for the manufacture of photocells and photoresistors, Losev continues to study the photoelectric properties of crystals. He studies more than 90 substances and highlights silicon with its noticeable photosensitivity.
At that time, there were not enough pure materials to achieve an accurate reproduction of the results obtained, but Losev (for the umpteenth time!) intuitively understands that the future belongs to this material. At the beginning of 1941, he began work on a new topic - "Method of electrolytic photoresistors, photosensitivity of some silicon alloys." When the Great Patriotic War began, Losev did not leave for evacuation, wishing to complete an article in which he presented the results of his research on silicon. Apparently, he managed to finish the work, since the article was sent to the editors of ZhETF. By that time, the editorial office had already been evacuated from Leningrad. Unfortunately, after the war no traces of this article could be found, and now one can only guess about its content.
On January 22, 1942, Oleg Vladimirovich Losev died of starvation in besieged Leningrad. He was 38 years old.
In the same 1942, in the USA, Sylvania and Western Electric began the industrial production of silicon (and a little later, germanium) point diodes, which were used as mixer detectors in radars. Losev's death coincided with the birth of silicon technology.
military springboard
In 1925, the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (AT&T) opens the Bell Telephone Laboratories research and development center. In 1936, the director of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Mervyn Kelly, decides to form a group of scientists who would conduct a series of studies aimed at replacing tube amplifiers with semiconductor ones. The group was led by Joseph Becker, who brought in the theoretical physicist William Shockley and the brilliant experimenter Walter Brattain.
After finishing his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the famous MIT, and joining the Bell Telephone Laboratories, Shockley, being an exceptionally ambitious and ambitious person, energetically gets down to business. In 1938, in the workbook of the 26-year-old Shockley, the first sketch of a semiconductor triode appears. The idea is simple and not original: to make a device as similar as possible to a vacuum tube, with the only difference that the electrons in it will flow through a thin filamentous semiconductor, and not fly in a vacuum between the cathode and anode. To control the current of the semiconductor, it was supposed to introduce an additional electrode (analogous to the grid) - applying a voltage of different polarity to it. Thus, it will be possible to either decrease or increase the number of electrons in the filament and, accordingly, change its resistance and current flow. Everything is like in a radio tube, only without vacuum, without a bulky glass container and without heating the cathode. The expulsion of electrons from the filament or their influx should have occurred under the influence of the electric field created between the control electrode and the filament, that is, due to the field effect. To do this, the thread must be precisely semiconductor. There are too many electrons in a metal and no fields can force them out, but there are practically no free electrons in a dielectric. Shockley proceeds to theoretical calculations, but all attempts to build a solid-state amplifier lead to nothing.
At the same time, in Europe, German physicists Robert Pohl and Rudolf Hilsch created a working contact three-electrode crystal amplifier based on potassium bromide. However, the German device did not represent any practical value. It had a very low operating frequency. There is evidence that in the first half of the 1930s, three-electrode semiconductor amplifiers were “assembled” by two radio amateurs, Canadian Larry Kaiser and New Zealand schoolboy Robert Adams. Adams, who later became a radio engineer, noticed that it never occurred to him to file a patent for an invention, since he got all the information for his amplifier from amateur radio magazines and other open sources.
By 1926–1930 include the work of Julius Lilienfeld (Fig. 19), a professor at the University of Leipzig, who patented the design of a semiconductor amplifier, now known as a field effect transistor (Fig. 20).
Rice. 19. Julius Lilienfeld
Rice. 20. Yu. Lilienfeld's patent for a field-effect transistor
Lilienfeld assumed that when a voltage is applied to a weakly conductive material, its conductivity will change and, as a result, an increase in electrical oscillations will occur. Despite obtaining a patent, Lilienfeld failed to create a working device. The reason was the most prosaic - in the 30s of the twentieth century, the necessary material was not yet found, on the basis of which a working transistor could be made. That is why the efforts of most scientists of that time were directed to the invention of a more complex bipolar transistor. Thus, they tried to get around the difficulties that arose in the implementation of the field-effect transistor.
Work on the solid state amplifier at Bell Telephone Laboratories was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. William Shockley and many of his colleagues are seconded to the Ministry of Defense, where they work until the end of 1945.
Solid-state electronics was not of interest to the military - the achievements seemed dubious to them. With one exception. Detectors. They just happened to be at the center of historical events.
An epic battle for Britain unfolded in the skies over the English Channel, reaching its climax in September 1940. After the occupation of Western Europe, England was left face to face with an armada of German bombers destroying coastal defenses and preparing an amphibious landing to capture the country - Operation Sea Lion. It is difficult to say what saved England - a miracle, the decisiveness of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, or radar stations. The radars that appeared in the late 1930s made it possible to quickly and accurately detect enemy aircraft and organize countermeasures in a timely manner. Having lost more than a thousand aircraft in the skies over Britain, Nazi Germany lost interest in the idea of capturing England in 1940 and began preparing a blitzkrieg in the East.
England needed radars, radars - crystal detectors, detectors - pure germanium and silicon. Germanium appeared first, and in significant quantities, in factories and laboratories. With silicon, due to the high temperature of its processing, at first there were some difficulties, but the problem was soon solved. After that, preference was given to silicon. Silicon was cheap compared to germanium. So, the springboard for jumping to the transistor was almost ready.
The Second World War was the first war in which science, in terms of its importance for defeating the enemy, acted on an equal footing with specific weapons technologies, and in some ways even outstripped them. Recall the nuclear and rocket projects. This list can also include a transistor project, the prerequisites for which were largely laid down by the development of military radar.
Opening
In the postwar years, Bell Telephone Laboratories began to accelerate work in the field of global communications. The equipment of the 1940s used two main elements for amplifying, converting and switching signals in subscriber circuits: a vacuum tube and an electromechanical relay. These elements were bulky, worked slowly, consumed a lot of energy and were not very reliable. To improve them meant to return to the idea of using semiconductors. At Bell Telephone Laboratories, a research group is re-established (Fig. 21), with William Shockley, who returned "from the war," becoming its scientific director. The team includes Walter Brattain, John Bardeen, John Pearson, Bert Moore and Robert Gibney.
Rice. 21. Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA, Bell Laboratories. Birthplace of the transistor.
At the very beginning, the team makes the most important decision: to focus on studying the properties of only two materials - silicon and germanium, as the most promising for the implementation of the task. Naturally, the group began to develop Shockley's pre-war idea of a field effect amplifier. But the electrons inside the semiconductor stubbornly ignored any potential changes at the gate electrode. From high voltages and currents, the crystals exploded, but did not want to change their resistance.
Theorist John Bardeen thought about this. Shockley, having not received a quick result, lost interest in the topic and did not take an active part in the work. Bardeen suggested that a significant part of the electrons actually do not “roam” freely around the crystal, but get stuck in some kind of traps at the very surface of the semiconductor. The charge of these "stuck" electrons shields the field applied from outside, which does not penetrate into the bulk of the crystal. This is how the theory of surface states entered solid state physics in 1947. Now that the cause of the failures seemed to be found, the group began to more meaningfully implement the idea of the field effect. There were simply no other ideas. They began to treat the surface of germanium in various ways, hoping to eliminate electron traps. We tried everything - chemical etching, mechanical polishing, applying various passivators to the surface. The crystals were immersed in various liquids, but there was no result. Then it was decided to localize the control zone as much as possible, for which one of the conductors and the control electrode were made in the form of closely spaced spring-loaded needles. The experimenter Brattain, who had 15 years of experience with various semiconductors, could turn the knobs of an oscilloscope for 25 hours a day.
The theorist Bardeen was always there, ready to test his theoretical calculations day and night. Both researchers, as they say, found each other. They practically did not leave the laboratory, but time passed, and there were still no significant results.
Once Brattain, tormented by failures, moved the needles almost close, moreover, he accidentally mixed up the polarities of the potentials applied to them. The scientist could not believe his eyes. He was startled, but the oscilloscope screen clearly showed the amplification of the signal. The theorist Bardeen reacted with lightning speed and unmistakable: there is no field effect, and it's not about him. Signal amplification occurs for a different reason. In all previous estimates, only electrons were considered as the main current carriers in a germanium crystal, and "holes", which were millions of times smaller, were naturally ignored. Bardin realized that it was the "holes" that mattered. The introduction of "holes" through one electrode (this process is called injection) causes an immeasurably greater current in the other electrode. And all this against the background of the immutability of the state of a huge number of electrons.
So, in an unpredictable way, on December 19, 1947, a point transistor was born (Fig. 22).
At first, the new device was called the germanium triode. Bardeen and Brattain didn't like the name. It didn't sound. They wanted the name to end in "thor", similar to a resistor or thermistor. Here they come to the aid of electronics engineer John Pierce, who was fluent in words (he would later become a well-known science popularizer and science fiction writer under the pseudonym J. J. Coupling). Pierce recalled that one of the parameters of a vacuum triode is the steepness of the characteristic, in English - transconductance. He suggested calling a similar parameter of a solid-state amplifier transresistance, and the amplifier itself, and this word was just spinning on the tongue, a transistor. Everyone liked the name.
A few days after the remarkable discovery, on Christmas Eve, December 23, 1947, the presentation of the transistor to the management of Bell Telephone Laboratories took place (Fig. 23).
Rice. 23. Bardeen-Brattain point transistor
William Shockley, who was vacationing in Europe, urgently returned to America. The unexpected success of Bardeen and Brattain deeply hurts his vanity. He was the first to think about a semiconductor amplifier, led the group, chose the direction of research, but he could not claim co-authorship in the "star" patent. Against the background of general jubilation, glitter and the sound of champagne glasses, Shockley looked disappointed and gloomy. And then something happens that will always be hidden from us by the veil of time. In one week, which Shockley would later call his "holy week", he created the theory of a transistor with p-n junctions that replaced exotic needles, and on New Year's Eve he invented a planar bipolar transistor. (Note that a real working bipolar transistor was not made until 1950.)
The proposal of a circuit diagram for a more efficient solid state amplifier with a layered structure equalized Shockley in the discovery of the transistor effect with Bardeen and Brattain.
Six months later, on June 30, 1948, in New York, at the headquarters of Bell Telephone Laboratories, after settling all the necessary patent formalities, an open presentation of the transistor took place. At that time, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union had already begun, so technical innovations were primarily evaluated by the military. To the surprise of everyone present, experts from the Pentagon were not interested in the transistor and recommended its use in hearing aids.
A few years later, the new device became an indispensable component in the control system of military missiles, but it was on that day that the myopia of the military saved the transistor from the heading "top secret".
Journalists reacted to the invention, too, without much emotion. On page forty-six, in the "Radio News" section of the New York Times, there was a brief note about the invention of a new radio device. But only.
Bell Telephone Laboratories did not expect this development. Military orders with their generous funding were not foreseen even in the distant future. An urgent decision is made to sell licenses for the transistor to everyone. The transaction amount is $25,000. A training center is being set up and seminars for specialists are being held. The results are not long in coming (Fig. 24).
The transistor is rapidly finding applications in a wide variety of applications, from military and computer equipment to consumer electronics. Interestingly, the first portable radio receiver was called that for a long time - a transistor.
European analogue
Work on the creation of a three-electrode semiconductor amplifier was also carried out on the other side of the ocean, but much less is known about them.
More recently, Belgian historian Armand Van Dormel and Stanford University professor Michael Riordan discovered that Bardeen-Brattain's "brother brother of the transistor" was invented and even commercialized in Europe in the late 1940s.
The European inventors of the point transistor were Herbert Franz Matare and Heinrich Johann Welker (Fig. 25). Matare was an experimental physicist who worked for the German firm Telefunken and worked on microwave electronics and radar. Welker was more of a theorist, taught for a long time at the University of Munich, and during the war years he worked for the Luftwaffe.
Rice. 25. Inventors of the transitron Herbert Mathare and Heinrich Welker
They met in Paris. After the defeat of fascist Germany, both physicists were invited to the European branch of the American corporation Westinghouse.
Back in 1944, Matare, while working on semiconductor rectifiers for radars, designed a device that he called a duodiode. It was a pair of parallel point rectifiers using the same germanium plate. With the right selection of parameters, the device suppressed noise in the radar receiving unit. Then Matare discovered that voltage fluctuations on one electrode can result in a change in the strength of the current passing through the second electrode. Note that the description of such an effect was contained in Lilienfeld's patent, and it is possible that Matare knew about it. But be that as it may, he became interested in the observed phenomenon and continued research.
Welker came to the idea of the transistor from a different angle, doing quantum physics and the band theory of solids. At the very beginning of 1945, he creates a solid-state amplifier circuit, very similar to Shockley's device. In March, Welker manages to assemble and test it, but he was no more lucky than the Americans. The device is not working.
In Paris, Matarat and Welker are instructed to organize the industrial production of semiconductor rectifiers for the French telephone network. At the end of 1947, rectifiers are launched into a series, and Matare and Welker have time to resume research. They proceed to further experiments with the duodiode. Together they make records from much purer germanium and get a stable amplification effect. Already at the beginning of June 1948, Matare and Welker created a stable working point transistor. The European transistor appears half a year later than the device of Bardeen and Brattain, but absolutely independently of it. Matare and Welker could not know anything about the work of the Americans. The first mention in the press about the "new radio engineering device" that came out of Bell Laboratories did not appear until July 1.
The further fate of the European invention was sad. Matare and Welker prepared a patent application for the invention in August, but the French patent office studied the documents for a very long time. Only in March 1952 did they receive a patent for the invention of the transitron - this is the name chosen by German physicists for their semiconductor amplifier. By that time, the Paris branch of Westinghouse had already begun mass production of transitrons. The main customer was the Postal Ministry. Many new telephone lines were being built in France. However, the age of transitrons was short-lived. Despite the fact that they worked better and longer than their American "colleague" (due to more careful assembly), transitrons could not conquer the world market. Subsequently, the French authorities generally refused to subsidize research in the field of semiconductor electronics, switching to larger nuclear projects. Matare and Welker's laboratory falls into disrepair. Scientists decide to return to their homeland. By that time, the revival of science and high-tech industry began in Germany. Welker gets a job in the laboratory of the Siemens concern, which he later leads, and Matare moves to Düsseldorf and becomes president of a small company, Intermetall, which produces semiconductor devices.
Afterword
If we trace the fate of the Americans, then John Bardeen left Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1951, took up the theory of superconductivity and in 1972, together with two of his students, was awarded the Nobel Prize "For the development of the theory of superconductivity", thus becoming the only one in history scientist, twice Nobel laureate.
Walter Brattain worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories until his retirement in 1967, when he returned to his hometown to teach physics at the local university.
The fate of William Shockley was as follows. He left Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1955 and, with financial help from Arnold Beckman, founded the Shockly Transistor Corporation, a transistor manufacturing company. Many talented scientists and engineers go to work in the new company, but after two years most of them leave Shockley. Arrogance, arrogance, unwillingness to listen to the opinion of colleagues and an obsession with not repeating the mistake he made in working with Bardeen and Brattain are doing their job. The company is falling apart.
His former employees Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, with the support of the same Beckman, founded Fairchild Semiconductor, and then, in 1968, created their own company, Intel.
Shockley's dream of building a semiconductor business empire was realized by others (Figure 26), and he again got the role of an outside observer. The irony is that back in 1952, it was Shockley who proposed the design of a silicon-based field-effect transistor. However, Shockly Transistor Corporation did not release any FETs. Today, this device is the basis of the entire computer industry.
Rice. 26. Evolution of the transistor
After failing in business, Shockley becomes a professor at Stanford University. He gives brilliant lectures on physics, personally deals with graduate students, but he lacks his former glory - everything that Americans call the capacious word publicity. Shockley is included in public life and begins to make presentations on many social and demographic issues. Offering solutions to acute problems associated with overpopulation in Asian countries and national differences, he slides into eugenics and racial intolerance. The press, television, scientific journals accuse him of extremism and racism. Shockley is "famous" again and seems to be enjoying the whole thing. His reputation and career as a scientist is coming to an end. He retires, stops communicating with everyone, even with his own children, and lives out his life as a recluse.
Different people, different destinies, but all of them are united by involvement in a discovery that has radically changed our world.
The date of December 19, 1947 can rightly be considered the birthday of a new era. The countdown of a new time has begun. The world has stepped into the digital age.
Literature
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- Andrew Emerson. Who really invented Transistor? www.radiobygones.com
- Michael Riordan. How Europe Missed the Transistor // IEEE Spectrum, Nov. 2005. www.spectrum.ieee.org