The ability to make a very miniature on/off switch changed the world. These tiny switches, known as transistors, make up the basis of all modern computing—they drive your cell phones, your bank ...

The first transistors were point contact devices, not far from the cats-whiskers of early radio receivers. They were fragile and expensive, and their performance was not very high. The transistor ...

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Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it's a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has ...

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Shrinking silicon transistors have reached their physical limits, but a team from the University of Tokyo is rewriting the rules. They've created a cutting-edge transistor using gallium-doped indium ...

A friend recently sent me an email noting that the classic 2N3904 bipolar transistor was now 60 years old. Since its “birth” was before I got involved with basic electronics, that callout was ...

The growing energy use of AI has gotten a lot of people working on ways to make it less power hungry. One option is to develop processors that are a better match to the sort of computational needs of ...

In a significant advancement for semiconductor technology, researchers at UC Santa Barbara have unveiled novel three-dimensional (3D) transistors utilizing two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors. Their ...

For decades, the semiconductor industry has been laser-focused on shrinking silicon transistors, but Peking University researchers believe the future might lie in changing materials entirely. In a ...

Figure 1 shows a variation on a sine wave oscillator, it uses just two transistors and a single variable resistor to set the frequency. Figure 1 Just a couple of components are needed for a simple ...

Why it matters: Silicon transistors are great, but just like any other object in the physical world, they are held back by a few limitations. The laws of physics put a bottleneck on performance and ...