Tags: devices

Description

On June 30, 1948, AT&T Bell Labs unveiled the transitor to the world, creating a spark of explosive economic growth that would lead into the Information Age. William Shockley led a team of researchers, including Walter Brattain and John Bardeen, who invented the device. Like the existing triode vacuum tube device, the transistor could amplify signals and switch currents on and off, but the transistor was smaller, cheaper, and more efficient. Moreover, it could be integrated with millions of other transistors onto a single chip, creating the integrated circuit at the heart of modern computers.

Today, most transistors are being manufactured with a minimum feature size of 60-90nm--roughly 200-300 atoms. As the push continues to make devices even smaller, researchers must account for quantum mechanical effects in the device behavior. With fewer and fewer atoms, the positions of impurities and other irregularities begin to matter, and device reliability becomes an issue. So rather than shrink existing devices, many researchers are working on entirely new devices, based on carbon nanotubes, spintronics, molecular conduction, and other nanotechnologies.

Learn more about transistors from the many resources on this site, listed below. Use our simulation tools to simulate performance characteristics for your own devices.

Wiki Pages (1-3 of 3)

  1. Electronics from the Bottom Up: A New Approach to Nanoelectronic Devices and Materials

    Vision The Network for Computational Nanotechnology seeks to bring a new perspective to engineering education to meet the challenges and opportunities of modern nanotechnology. Fifty years ago...

    https://nanohub.org/wiki/ElectronicsFromTheBottomUp

  2. NCN Nano-Devices for Medicine and Biology

    This NCN theme seeks to extend the understanding and computational tools developed in the Nanoelectronics and NEMS themes and apply them to the development of devices for medicine and biology. The...

    https://nanohub.org/wiki/NCNNanoDevicesforMedicineandBiology

  3. Simulation of laser devices with ActiveMedia nanophotonics tool (ACME NPDS)

    This tutorial is intended to demonstrate how to build a device and analyze its optical properties and lasing behavior.

    https://nanohub.org/wiki/SimulationoflaserdeviceswithActiveMediananophotonicstoolACMENPDS