And on the horizon are billions, a goal widely seen as reachable early next century as line widths shrink to near 100 nanometers. And today, they are nearing 300 nanometers.Īmid this shrinkage, chips went from having hundreds of transistors to millions. By 1980, these parts had shrunk to 3,500 nanometers. In 1970, the constituent parts of transistors were about 12,000 nanometers wide. A human hair has a width of about 100,000 nanometers, one nanometer being a billionth of a meter, which equals 39.37 inches. The law is based on the steady shrinkage of transistor size. Outlandish though it was, the law has turned out to be prophetically true, holding up remarkably well over the decades. Noyce to found the Intel Corporation, predicted that the number of transistors that designers could pack on a chip would double every 18 months or so, an axiom later known as Moore's law. In 1965, Gordon Moore of Fairchild, who three years later joined with Dr. By the 1960's, companies were racing to cram ever more transistors into devices known as integrated circuits, rapidly changing the face of electronics as the tiny chips became increasingly powerful. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments did so in 1958, and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor advanced the idea in 1959, his refinement paving the way for mass production. The other breakthrough came as researchers began to carve many transistors into a single ''chip'' of semiconductive material, usually made of silicon. One advance let a relatively small base voltage excite a full flow of electrons that had no fluctuations, allowing transistors to act as on-off switches, or, in mathematical terms, ''0'' and ''1.'' This digital mode of operation gave rise to logic circuits and central processing units of computers that were increasingly compact and fast. The three Bell physicists won a Nobel Prize for their discovery in 1956 as the invention became increasingly dependable and gave birth to an age of miniaturized electronics. Relatively cheap, transistors did their amplification without the heat, bulk and heavy power drain of vacuum tubes, whose evacuated glass cylinders glowed like dim light bulbs. For instance, a series of transistors could boost a microphone's tiny currents into ones powerful enough to drive a loudspeaker. Importantly, the large flow varied proportionally in relation to the size of the small base current, allowing all kinds of amplification. That current changed the conductive properties of the material and let a relatively large number of electrons flow between the semiconductor's outer layers (the emitter and collector). The scientists first made a sandwich of semiconductive materials and then applied a small current, or flow of electrons, to its middle region (called the base). Brattain in 1947, worked like a vacuum tube to amplify small electric currents in a way that was remarkably simple. The first transistor, built by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter H. Meyerson, a senior manager in chip design at the Watson Research Center of the International Business Machines Corporation in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. ''If you know where the wall is, you can make profound changes,'' said Dr. One dream is to combine such chips into tiny personal supercomputers that would ride inconspicuously on a person's body to digitally record and recall everything read, heard and seen. Scores of research teams are now racing to achieve such tininess. The parts of these most Lilliputian of all transistors are about one five-millionth the size of those of the first rudimentary transistor shown to the public, in theory allowing a phenomenal one trillion of them to crowd a computer chip the size of a fingernail. They are striving to create transistors that work by virtue of the movement of a single electron, the subatomic particle that is a building block of matter and the fundamental unit of electricity. Now scientists around the globe are making a furious assault on the last frontier of electronics, perhaps foreshadowing an end to at least one aspect of the revolution. Today, almost a half-century later, with transistors shrunk drastically in size, they are massed by the millions on computer chips and humming away as the electronic brains of toys, cameras, wristwatches, faxes, cellular telephones, radios, musical instruments, cars, jets, computers, televisions, rockets, satellites, space probes and countless other devices. The New York Times ran a four-paragraph article saying the half-inch device had ''several applications in radio where a vacuum tube ordinarily is employed.'' When the invention was unveiled publicly in 1948, it received scant attention. Neither they nor anyone else knew where it would go. IT was just before Christmas in 1947 that a team of scientists at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., created the first transistor.
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