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.

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1. ECE 606 Lecture 7: Intrinsic semiconductors and Concepts of Doping

   Online Presentations | 28 Sep 2012 | Contributor(s):: Gerhard Klimeck

2. ECE 606 Lecture 8: Temperature Dependent Carrier Density Concepts of Recombination

   Online Presentations | 28 Sep 2012 | Contributor(s):: Gerhard Klimeck

3. ECE 606 Lecture 9: Recombination Process and Rates

   Online Presentations | 28 Sep 2012 | Contributor(s):: Gerhard Klimeck

4. ECE 606 Lecture 4: Periodic Potentials Solutions of Schrödinger's Equation

   Online Presentations | 14 Sep 2012 | Contributor(s):: Gerhard Klimeck

5. ECE 606 Lecture 2: Quantum Mechanics

   Online Presentations | 14 Sep 2012 | Contributor(s):: Gerhard Klimeck

6. ECE 606 Lecture 3: Emergence of Bandstructure

   Online Presentations | 31 Aug 2012 | Contributor(s):: Gerhard Klimeck

   Table of Contents:00:00 ECE606: Solid State Devices Lecture 300:24 Motivation01:17 Time-independent Schrodinger Equation02:22 Time-independent Schrodinger Equation04:23 A Simple Differential Equation05:29 Presentation Outline05:46 Full Problem Difficult: Toy Problems First06:07 Case 1: Solution...

7. ECE 606 Lecture 1: Introduction/Crystal Classification

   Online Presentations | 30 Aug 2012 | Contributor(s):: Gerhard Klimeck

8. Nanophotonics with Metamaterials

   Online Presentations | 27 Aug 2012 | Contributor(s):: Vladimir M. Shalaev

   One of the most unique properties of light is that it can package information into a signal of zero mass and propagate it at the ultimate speed. It is, however, a daunting challenge to bring photonic devices to the nanometer scale because of the fundamental diffraction limit. Metamaterials can...

9. All-Spin Logic Devices

   Online Presentations | 19 Jul 2012 | Contributor(s):: Behtash Behinaein

   We propose a spintronic device that uses spin at every stage of its operation: input and output information are represented by the magnetization of nanomagnets which communicate through spin-coherent channels. Based on simulations with an experimentally benchmarked model we argue that the device...

10. Journey Along the Carbon Road

    Online Presentations | 19 Apr 2012 | Contributor(s):: Zhihong Chen

    I will discuss two distinct topics: In the first part of my talk I will present results on carbon nanotubes focusing on high performance computing with the aim to replace silicon in logic device applications. Specifically, the ballistic transport regime that has been reached with the shortest...

11. 

    Biswadev Roy

    https://nanohub.org/members/65791

12. Dissipative Quantum Transport in Semiconductor Nanostructures

    Papers | 28 Dec 2011 | Contributor(s):: Peter Greck

    In this work, we investigate dissipative quantum transport properties of an open system. After presenting the background of ballistic quantum transport calculations, a simple scattering mechanism, called Büttiker Probes, is introduced. Then, we assess the properties of the Büttiker Probe model...

13. Dec 07 2011

    International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium (ISDRS) 2011

    The International Semiconductor Device Research Symposium is a biennial conference on exploratory research in electronic and photonic materials and devices. Bringing together diverse participants,...

    https://nanohub.org/events/details/323

14. 2011 NCN@Purdue Summer School: Electronics from the Bottom Up

    Workshops | 20 Jul 2011

    click on image for larger versionAlumni Discussion Group: LinkedIn

15. The History of Semiconductor Heterostructures Research: From Early Double Heterostructure Concept to Modern Quantum Dot Structures

    Online Presentations | 11 Jul 2011 | Contributor(s):: Zhores I. Alferov

    It would be very difficult today to imagine solid-state physics without semiconductor heterostructures. Semiconductor heterostructures and especially double heterostructures, including quantum wells, quantum wires and quantum dots, currently comprise the object of investigation of two thirds of...

16. 

    Shashank Shekhar Harivyasi

    https://nanohub.org/members/54665

17. Quantitative Modeling and Simulation of Quantum Dots

    Presentation Materials | 18 Apr 2011 | Contributor(s):: Muhammad Usman

    Quantum dots grown by self-assembly process are typically constructed by 50,000 to 5,000,000 structural atoms which confine a small, countable number of extra electrons or holes in a space that is comparable in size to the electron wavelength. Under such conditions quantum dots can be interpreted...

18. The Elusive Spin Transistor

    Online Presentations | 11 Apr 2011 | Contributor(s):: Supriyo Datta

    This presentation is a short introductory tutorial on spin-transistors.

19. Control of Spin Precession in a Datta-Das Transistor Structure

    Online Presentations | 11 Apr 2011 | Contributor(s):: Hyun Cheol Koo

    Transistors Switch onto Spin Using the spin of an electron in addition to, or instead of, the charge properties is believed to have many benefits in terms of speed, power-cost, and integration density over conventional electronic circuits. At the heart of the field of spintronics has been a...

20. [Illinois] ECE 398: Electronic and Photonic Devices

    Courses | 07 Feb 2011 | Contributor(s):: Kent D Choquette

    Fall Semester, 2010 A first course on active and passive photonic devices and applications. Optical processes in dielectric and semiconductor materials discussed including waveguide propagation, confinement, electrical junctions, and emission/absorption. Active and passive photonic components...