Shockley semiconductor laboratory

After the war, Shockley and his team at Bell Labs first developed the point-contact transistor, and then the junction transistor, using germanium, and for which they received the Nobel Prize. However, Shockley was a difficult person to work with - he had a domineering, abrasive style that caused him to fall out with his co-inventors and subsequently to leave Bell Labs. He then set up his own Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, which became part of what would later be known as Silicon Valley in California. Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory was sold to ITT in 1968. 

A group of Shockley s co-workers left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1958 to set up Fairchild Semiconductors, because Shockley would not allow work to continue on the silicon transistor. The group included Robert Noyce (1927-1990) and Gordon Moore (b.l929). 

In 1948 William Bradford Shockley (1910-1989), who is considered the inventor of the transistor, and his associates at Bell Research Laboratories, Walter Houser Brattain (1902-1987) and John Bardeen (1908-1991), discovered that a crystal of germanium could act as a semiconductor of electricity. This unique property of germanium indicated to them that it could be used as both a rectifier and an amplifier to replace the old glass vacuum tubes in radios. Their friend John Robinson Pierce (1910-2002) gave this new solid-state device the name transistor, since the device had to overcome some resistance when a current of electricity passed through it. Shockley, Brattain, and Bardeen all shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. 

The first solid-state transistor was made not from silicon but from the element below it in the Periodic Table germanium. This substance is also a semiconductor, and can be doped in the same way. William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen devised the germanium transistor at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey in 1947. It was a crude and clunky device (Fig. VJa) - bigger than a single one of today s silicon chips, which can house millions of miniaturized transistors, diodes, and other components (Fig. Vjb). The three inventors shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956. 

FIGURE 18.8 The transistor and its inventors, (a) The first transistor, constructed in 1947 at Bell Laboratories. Electrical contact is made at a single point and the signal is amplified as it passes through a solid semiconductor modern junction transistors amplify in a similar manner, (b) Envelope and stamp commemorating 25 years of the transistor, with portraits of its inventors, Walter Brattain, William Shockley, and John Bardeen. 

The transistor has become the most important building block in electronics. It is the modem, miniature, semiconductor equivalent of the thermionic valve and was invented in 1947 by Bardeen, Shockley and Brattain at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States. Transistors are packaged as separate or discrete components, as shown in Fig. 3.96. 

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