Electronics — The Beginning
The beginning of electronics was marked in1906 when Lee De Frost invented the vacuum triode. A triode vacuum tube, is basically the first electronic amplification device, consisting of three elements, a filament or cathode, the grid, a plate or the anode. This phenomenal invention later paved the way for the discovery of amplifier, the soul of all intricate and complex electronic gadgets.
It was in 1948, three Nobel laureates, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley invented the transistor that revolutionized the electronics industry! A transistor is basically a semiconductor device, that can amplify or switch electrical signals. The conventional vacuum tubes, being bulky, unreliable and consuming way too much power, the invention of transistors provided an efficient and more reliable alternative.
The word transistor comes form the words transfer and resistor, as the electric current in a transistor is transferred across a resistor. In the early 1950’s the change in transistor semiconductor material from germanium to silicon proved to be crucial towards the future of the silicon age of age of electronics. The limitations of germanium were that it has a low band gap — the energy required to push out electrons in the atom to the conduction band(0.67 electron volts versus 1.12 electron volt for silicon). So transistors made of germanium have much higher leakage currents: as the temperature increases, their delicately balanced junctions become literally drowned in a swarming sea of free electrons. The inability to work under extreme environmental conditions were a major drawback of these transistors.
Initially, discrete resistors and transistors were mounted on a printed circuit board. This was then replaced by digital transistors, having transistor chips with built in resistors. This mechanism required much less area to mount components on a PCB, and significantly reduced the number of components. Soon the process of miniaturization of electronic components gained momentum. The first integrated IC’s took birth. There were rapid developments in the integrated circuit technology, starting from SSI (Small Scale Integration), MSI(Medium Scale Integration), LSI ( Large Scale Integration) and the most recent VLSI(Very Large Scale Integration). Tremendous changes took place over the span of 30 years, with both the size and prize of digital computers reducing. Today, electronics plays an instrumental role in one’s life, penetrating into the nook and corners. Transistor, indeed the greatest invention of the 20th century!
