SEMICONDUCTOR

ASSIGNMENT

NAME-ISHANT
ROLL NO. – 2K18/B12/1588
SUBMITTED TO -MR.DESHRAJ
MEENA SIR

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INDEX
Sno.
Topic Page no.
2. Development of
transistors
3.
4.
5.

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 TRANSISTOR
Transistor, semiconductor device for amplifying, controlling, and
generating electricalsignals. Transistors are the active components of integrated
circuits, or “microchips,” which often contain billions of these minuscule devices
etched into their shiny surfaces. Deeply embedded in almost everything electronic,
transistors have become the nerve cells of the Information Age.

There are typically three electrical leads in a transistor, called the emitter, the
collector, and the base—or, in modern switching applications, the source, the
drain, and the gate. An electrical signal applied to the base (or gate) influences the
semiconductor material’s ability to conduct electrical current, which flows between
the emitter (or source) and collector (or drain) in most applications. A voltage
source such as a battery drives the current, while the rate of current flow through
the transistor at any given moment is governed by an input signal at the gate—
much as a faucet valve is used to regulate the flow of water through a garden hose.
The first commercial applications for transistors were for hearing aids and
“pocket” radiosduring the 1950s. With their small size and low
power consumption, transistors were desirable substitutes for the vacuum
tubes (known as “valves” in Great Britain) then used to amplify weak electrical
signals and produce audible sounds. Transistors also began to replace vacuum
tubes in the oscillator circuits used to generate radio signals, especially after
specialized structures were developed to handle the higher frequencies and power
levels involved. Low-frequency, high-power applications, such as power-supply
inverters that convert alternating current (AC) into direct current (DC), have also
been transistorized. Some power transistors can now handle currents of hundreds
of amperes at electric potentials over a thousand volts.
By far the most common application of transistors today is for computer
memory chips—including solid-state multimedia storage devices for electronic
games, cameras, and MP3players—and microprocessors, where millions of
components are embedded in a single integrated circuit. Here the voltage applied to
the gate electrode, generally a few volts or less, determines whether current can
flow from the transistor’s source to its drain. In this case the transistor operates as a
switch: if a current flows, the circuit involved is on, and if not, it is off. These two
distinct states, the only possibilities in such a circuit, correspond respectively to
the binary 1s and 0s employed in digital computers. Similar applications of
transistors occur in the complex switching circuits used throughout modern
telecommunications systems. The potential switching speeds of these transistors
now are hundreds of gigahertz, or more than 100 billion on-and-off cycles per
second.

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Development Of Transistors
The transistor was invented in 1947–48 by three American physicists, John
Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley, at the American Telephone
and Telegraph Company’sBell Laboratories. The transistor proved to be a
viable alternative to the electron tube and, by the late 1950s, supplanted the latter
in many applications. Its small size, low heatgeneration, high reliability, and low
power consumption made possible a breakthrough in the miniaturization of
complex circuitry. During the 1960s and ’70s, transistors were incorporated
into integrated circuits, in which a multitude of components (e.g., diodes, resistors,
and capacitors) are formed on a single “chip” of semiconductor material.
Motivation and early radar research
Electron tubes are bulky and fragile, and they consume large amounts of power to
heat their cathode filaments and generate streams of electrons; also, they often burn
out after several thousand hours of operation. Electromechanical switches, or
relays, are slow and can become stuck in the on or off position. For applications
requiring thousands of tubes or switches, such as the nationwide telephone systems
developing around the world in the 1940s and the first electronic digital computers,
this meant constant vigilance was needed to minimize the inevitable breakdowns.
An alternative was found in semiconductors, materials such
as silicon or germanium whose electrical conductivity lies midway between that
of insulators such as glass and conductorssuch as aluminum. The conductive
properties of semiconductors can be controlled by “doping” them with select
impurities, and a few visionaries had seen the potential of such devices for
telecommunications and computers. However, it was military funding
for radardevelopment in the 1940s that opened the door to their realization. The
“superheterodyne” electronic circuits used to detect radar waves required
a diode rectifier—a device that allows current to flow in just one direction—that
could operate successfully at ultrahigh frequencies over one gigahertz. Electron
tubes just did not suffice, and solid-state diodes based on existing copper-oxide
semiconductors were also much too slow for this purpose.
Crystal rectifiers based on silicon and germanium came to the rescue. In these
devices a tungsten wire was jabbed into the surface of the semiconductor material,
which was doped with tiny amounts of impurities, such as boron or phosphorus.
The impurity atoms assumed positions in the material’s crystal lattice, displacing
silicon (or germanium) atoms and thereby generating tiny populations of charge
carriers (such as electrons) capable of conducting usable electrical current.
Depending on the nature of the charge carriers and the applied voltage, a current
could flow from the wire into the surface or vice-versa, but not in both directions.
Thus, these devices served as the much-needed rectifiers operating at the gigahertz
frequencies required for detecting rebounding microwave radiation in military
radar systems. By the end of World War II, millions of crystal rectifiers were being

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produced annually by such American manufacturers as Sylvania and Western
Electric.
Innovation at Bell Labs
Executives at Bell Labs had recognized that semiconductors might lead to solid-
state alternatives to the electron-tube amplifiers and electromechanical switches
employed throughout the nationwide Bell telephone system. In 1936 the new
director of research at Bell Labs, Mervin Kelly, began recruiting solid-state
physicists. Among his first recruits was William B. Shockley, who proposed a
few amplifier designs based on copper-oxide semiconductor materials then used to
make diodes. With the help of Walter H. Brattain, an experimental physicist
already working at Bell Labs, he even tried to fabricate a prototypedevice in 1939,
but it failed completely. Semiconductor theory could not yet explain exactly what
was happening to electrons inside these devices, especially at the interface
between copper and its oxide. Compounding the difficulty of any theoretical
understanding was the problem of controlling the exact composition of these early
semiconductor materials, which were binary combinations of different chemical
elements (such as copper and oxygen).
With the close of World War II, Kelly reorganized Bell Labs and created a new
solid-state research group headed by Shockley. The postwar search for a solid-state
amplifier began in April 1945 with Shockley’s suggestion that silicon and
germanium semiconductors could be used to make a field-effect amplifier
(see integrated circuit: Field-effect transistors). He reasoned that an electric
field from a third electrode could increase the conductivity of a sliver of
semiconductor material just beneath it and thereby allow usable current to flow
through the sliver. But attempts to fabricate such a device by Brattain and others in
Shockley’s group again failed. The following March, John Bardeen, a theoretical
physicist whom Shockley had hired for his group, offered a possible explanation.
Perhaps electrons drawn to the semiconductor surface by the electric field were
blocking the penetration of this field into the bulk material, thereby preventing it
from influencing the conductivity.
Bardeen’s conjecture spurred a basic research program at Bell Labs into the
behaviour of these “surface-state” electrons. While studying this phenomenon in
November 1947, Brattain stumbled upon a way to neutralize their blocking effect
and permit the applied field to penetrate deep into the semiconductor material.
Working closely together over the next month, Bardeen and Brattain invented the
first successful semiconductor amplifier, called the point-contact transistor, on
December 16, 1947. Similar to the World War II crystal rectifiers, this weird-
looking device had not one but two closely spaced metal wires jabbing into the
surface of a semiconductor—in this case, germanium. The input signal on one of
these wires (the emitter) boosted the conductivity of the germanium beneath both
of them, thus modulating the output signal on the other wire (the collector).
Observers present at a demonstration of this device the following week could hear
amplified voices in the earphones that it powered. Shockley later called this

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invention a “magnificent Christmas present” for the farsighted company, which
had supported the research program that made this breakthrough.

The first transistor, invented by American physicists John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B.
Shockley.AT&T Bell Labs/Science Photo Library/Photo Researchers, Inc.

Not to be outdone by members of his own group, Shockley conceived yet another
way to fabricate a semiconductor amplifier the very next month, on January 23,
1948. His junction transistor was basically a three-layer sandwich of germanium or
silicon in which the adjacent layers would be doped with different impurities to
induce distinct electrical characteristics. An input signal entering the middle layer
—the “meat” of the semiconductor sandwich—determined how much current
flowed from one end of the device to the other under the influence of an applied
voltage. Shockley’s device is often called the bipolar junction transistor because its
operation requires that the negatively charged electrons and their positively
charged counterparts (the holes corresponding to an absence of electrons in
the crystal lattice) coexist briefly in the presence of one another.
The name transistor, a combination of transfer and resistor, was coined for these
devices in May 1948 by Bell Labs electrical engineer John Robinson Pierce, who
was also a science-fiction author in his spare time. A month later Bell Labs
announced the revolutionary invention in a press conference held at its New York
City headquarters, heralding Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley as the three
coinventors of the transistor. The three were eventually awarded the Nobel
Prize for Physics for their invention.
Although the point-contact transistor was the first transistor invented, it faced a
difficult gestation period and was eventually used only in a switch made for the
Bell telephone system. Manufacturing them reliably and with uniform operating
characteristics proved a daunting problem, largely because of hard-to-control
variations in the metal-to-semiconductor point contacts.
Shockley had foreseen these difficulties in the process of conceiving the junction
transistor, which he figured would be much easier to manufacture. But it still
required more than three years, until mid-1951, to resolve its own development

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problems. Bell Labs scientists, engineers, and technicians first had to find ways to
make ultrapure germanium and silicon, form large crystals of these elements, dope
them with narrow layers of the required impurities, and attach delicate wires to
these layers to serve as electrodes. In July 1951 Bell Labs announced the
successful invention and development of the junction transistor, this time with only
Shockley in the spotlight.
Commercialization

Commercial transistors began to roll off production lines during the 1950s,
after Bell Labslicensed the technology of their production to other companies,
including General Electric, Raytheon, RCA, Sylvania, and Transitron Electronics.
Transistors found ready applications in lightweight devices such as hearing
aids and portable radios. Texas Instruments Inc., working with the Regency
Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates, manufactured the first
transistor radio in late 1954. Selling for $49.95, the Regency TR-1 employed
four germanium junction transistors in a multistage amplifier of radio signals. The
very next year a new Japanese company, Sony, introduced its own transistor radio
and began to corner the market for this and other transistorized
consumer electronics.
Transistors also began replacing vacuum tubes in the digital
computers manufactured by IBM, Control Data, and other companies. “It seems to
me that in these robot brains the transistor is the ideal nerve cell,” Shockley had
observed in a 1949 radio interview. “The advantage of the transistor is that it is
inherently a small-size and low-power device,” noted Bell Labs circuit engineer
Robert Wallace early in the 1950s. “This means you can pack a large number of
them in a small space without excessive heat generation and achieve
low propagation delays. And that’s what you need for logic applications. The
significance of the transistor is not that it can replace the tube but that it can do
things the vacuum tube could never do!” After 1955 IBM started purchasing
germanium transistors from Texas Instruments to employ in its computer circuits.
By the end of the 1950s, bipolar junction transistors had almost completely
replaced electron tubes in computer applications.

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Silicon transistors
During the 1950s, meanwhile, scientists and engineers at Bell Labs and Texas
Instrumentswere developing advanced technologies needed to
produce silicon transistors. Because of its higher melting temperature and greater
reactivity, silicon was much more difficult to work with than germanium, but it
offered major prospects for better performance, especially in switching
applications. Germanium transistors make leaky switches; substantial leakage
currents can flow when these devices are supposedly in their off state. Silicon
transistors have far less leakage. In 1954 Texas Instruments produced the first
commercially available silicon junction transistors and quickly dominated this new
market—especially for military applications, in which their high cost was of little
concern.
In the mid-1950s Bell Labs focused its transistor-development efforts around
new diffusiontechnologies, in which very narrow semiconductor layers—with
thicknesses measured in microns, or millionths of a metre—are prepared by
diffusing impurity atoms into the semiconductor surface from a hot gas. Inside a
diffusion furnace the impurity atoms penetrate more readily into the silicon or
germanium surface; their penetration depth is controlled by varying
the density, temperature, and pressure of the gas as well as the processing time.
(See integrated circuit: Fabricating ICs.) For the first time, diodes and transistors
produced by these diffusion implantation processes functioned at frequencies
above 100 megahertz (100 million cycles per second). These diffused-base
transistors could be used in receivers and transmitters for FM radio and television,
which operate at such high frequencies.
Another important breakthrough occurred at Bell Labs in 1955, when Carl Frosch
and Link Derick developed a means of producing a glassy silicon dioxide outer
layer on the siliconsurface during the diffusion process. This layer offered
transistor producers a promising way to protect the silicon underneath from further
impurities once the diffusion process was finished and the desired electrical
properties had been established.
Texas Instruments, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, and other companies
took the lead in applying these diffusion technologies to the large-scale
manufacture of transistors. At Fairchild, physicist Jean Hoerni developed the
planar manufacturing process, whereby the various semiconductor layers and their
sensitive interfaces are embedded beneath a protective silicon dioxide outer layer.
The company was soon making and selling planar silicon transistors, largely for
military applications. Led by Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore, Fairchild’s
scientists and engineers extended this revolutionary technique to the manufacture
of integrated circuits.
In the late 1950s Bell Labs researchers developed ways to use the new diffusion
technologies to realize Shockley’s original 1945 idea of a field-effect transistor
(FET). To do so, they had to overcome the problem of surface-state electrons,
which would otherwise have blocked external electric fields from penetrating into
the semiconductor. They succeeded by carefully cleaning the silicon surface and

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growing a very pure silicon dioxide layer on it. This approach reduced the number
of surface-state electrons at the interface between the silicon and oxide layers,
permitting fabrication of the first successful field-effect transistor in 1960 at Bell
Labs—which, however, did not pursue its development any further.
Refinements of the FET design by other companies, especially RCA and Fairchild,
resulted in the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) during
the early 1960s. The key problems to be solved were the stability and reliability of
these MOS transistors, which relied upon interactions occurring at or near the
sensitive silicon surface rather than deep inside. The two firms began to make
MOS transistors commercially available in late 1964.
In early 1963 Frank Wanlass at Fairchild developed the complementary
MOS (CMOS) transistor circuit, based on a pair of MOS transistors. This approach
eventually proved ideal for use in integrated circuits because of its simplicity of
production and very low power dissipation during standby operation. Stability
problems continued to plague MOS transistors, however, until researchers at
Fairchild developed solutions in the mid-1960s. By the end of the decade, MOS
transistors were beginning to displace bipolar junction transistors in microchip
manufacturing. Since the late 1980s CMOS has been the technology of choice for
digital applications, while bipolar transistors are now used primarily
for analog and microwave devices.

CMOSA complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) consists of a pair of semiconductors connected to

a common secondary voltage such that they operate in opposite (complementary) fashion. Thus, when one
transistor is turned on, the other is turned off, and vice versa.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Transistor Principles
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The p-n junction
The operation of junction transistors, as well as most other semiconductor devices,
depends heavily on the behaviour of electrons and holes at the interface between
two dissimilar layers, known as a p-n junction. Discovered in 1940 by Bell
Labs electrochemist Russell Ohl, p-n junctions are formed by adding two different
impurity elements to adjacent regions of germanium or silicon. The addition of
these impurity elements is called doping. Atoms of elements from Group 15 of
the periodic table (which possess five valence electrons), such
as phosphorus or arsenic, contribute an electron that has no natural resting place
within the crystal lattice. These excess electrons are therefore loosely bound and
relatively free to roam about, acting as charge carriers that can conduct electrical
current. Atoms of elements from Group 13 (which have three valence electrons),
such as boron or aluminum, induce a deficit of electrons when added as impurities,
effectively creating “holes” in the lattice. These positively charged quantum
mechanical entities are also fairly free to roam around and conduct electricity.
Under the influence of an electric field, the electrons and holes move in opposite
directions. During and immediately after World War II, chemists
and metallurgists at Bell Labs perfected techniques of adding impurities to high-
purity siliconand germanium to induce the desired electron-rich layer (known as
the n-layer) and the electron-poor layer (known as the p-layer) in these
semiconductors, as described in the section Development of transistors.

electron hole: movementMovement of an electron hole in a crystal lattice.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

A p-n junction acts as a rectifier, similar to the old point-contact crystal rectifiers,

permitting easy flow of current in only a single direction. If no voltage is applied
across the junction, electrons and holes will gather on opposite sides of the

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interface to form a depletion layer that will act as an insulator between the two
sides. A negative voltage applied to the n-layer will drive the excess electrons
within it toward the interface, where they will combine with the positively charged
holes attracted there by the electric field. Current will then flow easily. If instead a
positive voltage is applied to the n-layer, the resulting electric field will draw
electrons away from the interface, so combinations of them with holes will occur
much less often. In this case current will not flow (other than tiny leakage
currents). Thus, electricity will flow in only one direction through a p-n junction.


The p-n junctionA barrier forms along the boundary between p-type and n-type semiconductors that is known as
a p-n junction. Because electrons under ordinary conditions will flow in only one direction through such
barriers, p-n junctions form the basis for creating electronic rectifiers and switches.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
A forward-biased p-n junctionAdding a small primary voltage such that the electron source (negative terminal)
is attached to the n-type semiconductor surface and the drain (positive terminal) is attached to the p-type
semiconductor surface results in a small continuous current. This arrangement is referred to as being forward-
biased.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Junction transistors

Shortly after his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain invented their

point-contact device, Bell Labs physicist William B. Shockley recognized that
these rectifying characteristics might also be used in making a junction transistor.
In a 1949 paper Shockley explained the physical principles behind the operation of
these junctions and showed how to use them in a three-layer—n-p-n or p-n-p—
device that could act as a solid-state amplifier or switch. Electric current would
flow from one end to the other, with the voltage applied to the inner layer

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governing how much current rushed by at any given moment. In the n-p-njunction
transistor, for example, electrons would flow from one n-layer through the inner p-
layer to the other n-layer. Thus, a weak electrical signal applied to the inner, base
layer would modulate the current flowing through the entire device. For this
current to flow, some of the electrons would have to survive briefly in the presence
of holes; in order to reach the second n-layer, they could not all combine with
holes in the p-layer. Such bipolar operation was not at all obvious when Shockley
first conceived his junction transistor. Experiments with increasingly
pure crystals of silicon and germanium showed that it indeed occurred, making
bipolar junction transistors possible.

An n-p-n transistor and its electronic symbol.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

To achieve bipolar operation, it also helps that the base layer be narrow, so that
electrons (in n-p-n transistors) and holes (in p-n-p) do not have to travel very far in
the presence of their opposite numbers. Narrow base layers also promote high-
frequency operation of junction transistors: the narrower the base, the higher the
operating frequency. That is a major reason why there was so much interest in
developing diffused-base transistors during the 1950s, as described in the
section Silicon transistors. Their microns-thick bases permitted transistors to
operate above 100 megahertz (100 million cycles per second) for the first time.

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