The Transistor That Won the World

Our team of 3 built our first alloy transistor, at MSU, as part of a class project, and it had a gain of 4. We were third best, with another group getting a gain of 8, and number two getting a gain of 6. The rest of the class all got gains below 1. We got an A-grade, while numbers one and two got an A+plus. I complained to our TA, and he told me to suck it up, since the rest of the class got C's. Academic Life was harsh back then. So later I became an IC designers, with several ASICs under my belt.

The FET, and especially the MOSFET, was a close equivalent to the way vacuum tubes work. This fact is often skipped in the history of transistors. In electronic design, the vacuum tube was an easily understood device. Put a voltage on the grid, stop current. Remove the grid voltage, current goes. On/off.

I like the use of a picture of a MOSBURGER store.

One late night around 1975, my dad and I had a conversation. He designed satellites. In the conversation, he mentioned how everyone went with bipolar TTL but he was using RCA’s CMOS. It worked much better in the environment of space. I was in high school at the time. I built a stopwatch using RCA CMOS SSI chips. I still have the RCA books that he showed me that night.

I'd like to add that one of my instructors, Robert W. Bower, made CMOS cost effective with his Self-Aligned Gate MOSFET, U.S. Patent No. 3,472,712 . This resulted in the MASS production of MOSFETS.

I worked at a Philips chip factory in the Netherlands in the late 80's, and we did have Ion cannons there, but most of the processes were still done with ovens that would get 1300ºc hot and the wafers would be in there for about 13 hours so we never would handle the wafers we had put ourselves in the oven. We were creating the one chip TV from Phiips. The good old times when Philips was still a big big player in the world market.

Quick correction: it is the opposite: nMOS are n-channel MOSFETs, so p-doped wells, while pMOS have an n-well. Thank you for your great videos!

In the description op MOSfets, you made some mistakes. Firstly, an nMOS transitor is in a p subtrate or well and a pMOS is in an n well or substrate. The n refers to the carriers after the channel is inverted (ie, when the fet starts to conduct). Also, when applying a positive voltage to the gate, electrons are attracted into the channel and with negative voltage holes are. Opposite charges attract and equal charges repel.

When your content dropped, it was the perfect end to my father's day. Thanks lad.

Asianometry, you never fail to deliver. I never knew that surface oxide growth was primarily developed as passivation. It’s so simple of a concept but not one I learned, and I spent 2 years working on preventing damage to the si/sio2 interface causing dangling bonds, creating traps and causing parametric shifts as device ‘on’ time increased.

Federico Faggin while at Fairchild worked on the self-aligned Si gate MOS technology. He then went on to design the 4004 CPU at Intel using the same technology. Cf his autobiography.

I don't come close to understanding all the details in even this video, which is a tiny, tiny piece of the whole understanding of microelectronics technology. What I do appreciate is the astounding scale of the big picture. What a long, strange trip it's been, from those early cat whiskers to an IC with feature sizes of a few nanometers, and many trillions of devices fabricated on one wafer. If this doesn't blow your mind, you must not have a mind to be blown. And we're not finished yet. Far from it.

TWO NOBEL PRIZES? Well ok then, that's a very short list of people (5)

it's incredible hearing stories about people from all over the world beating the odds and moving to america to try their best in the highest areas of competitiveness. we should celebrate that kind of thing more

Wizards inscribe secret runes upon thin sheets of metal and then harness the power of lightning through it to force the metal to think, and you still think magic isn't real?

6:50 Dr. I. M. Ross. In between 1962 and 1973, per US Government request, few hand-picked Bell Labs researchers and engineers were transferred out to a newly formed company: Bellcomm Inc. in Washington DC. The firm's task is to serve System Engineering role and coordinate with many NASA contractors to make Lunar landing possible. Yes, that's Apollo program and later Skylab. After they completed the tour of duty, they returned back to BTL. Many of them soon got promoted to senior leadership positions: Ian (Bell Labs president), Day (BL Chief Architecture SVP), Martersteck (BL Switching Systems SVP), and many others. ====== BTW, 3N99 is a depletion mode MOSFET, a not-so-common semiconductor component.

"since we are in the caveman days before the British commercialised ion implantation..." a video on the Rise and fall of Lintott (later Applied Material Implant Division) would be cool. I worked there in the late 90s...

Applause for the day I never missed your video 😁😁 ,thanks for your detailed information once again 👏

When I started in IC design, the first chip had a metal gate process. I sure don't miss that mess! :D Neither do I miss processes with only one metal layer.

Not tired of this diagram yet. Used all of this for so long in industry. In hobby. And as a child, marveled at using the same. Happy to watch this and to watch this again. Important history for so many reasons. So many layers. Pun intended