Robert Plachno News Today

When Bell Labs announced the creation of the first working MOSFET by Atallah and Kahng in 1960, RCA Labs was immediately interested. Like IBM Research, RCA Labs was not closely coupled to RCA’s product development and manufacturing operations. RCA’s bountiful corporate revenues in the early 1950s accustomed RCA Labs to having had plenty of budget,…

It’s hardly surprising that semiconductor companies were reluctant to invest much energy into MOSFET development in the early 1960s. Early MOSFETs were 100 times slower than bipolar transistors, and they were considered unstable, for good reason: their electrical characteristics drifted badly and unpredictably with time and temperature. A lot of research and development work would…