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The first six parts of this article series described developments at major semiconductor vendors that played big roles in the MOSFET’s development. However, because fabs were relatively easy to create in the early days of ICs, there are many smaller stories as well. The following story, about one HP division’s involvement in MOSFET and NMOS…
In 1952, the same year that IBM introduced its first electronic computer, the tube-based Model 701, the company became an original licensee for the Bell Labs transistor patents, and Thomas Watson Jr. became IBM’s president. Prior to 1952, IBM specialized in punched-card machines: card readers, card punches, card tabulators, card calculators, and of course, the…
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…
No company was better equipped and better positioned to capitalize on the development of the first MOSFET than Fairchild Semiconductor. Founded in 1957 to work on silicon transistors, Jean Hoerni developed the planar process and Robert Noyce developed the ideas for the first practical integrated circuit (IC) based on Hoerni’s planar process just months before…
Here are some of the significant dates in the evolution of the transistor, which turns 75 in December.