The transistors at the heart of every computer, today numbering in the billions on a single chip, have generally been based on the concept John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley first turned into a prototype at the Bell Labs in 1947. Physicists have now demonstrated a radically simpler transistor design, first patented by Austrian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925 but never turned into a practical device until now. This simpler version could push computers to become faster and to consume less power.

In every transistor, an electrode, called the gate, governs whether current can run along a semiconductor strip, thereby defining an on or off state essential to a computer’s binary function. Traditionally, the semiconductor strip is structured like a sandwich, with one type of material between two layers of another type. In the “off” position the sandwich acts as an electrical insulator, but the gate can turn it into a conductor, typically by creating an electric field. In chip fabrication the sandwich is obtained from a strip of silicon “doped” with other elements. For example, the middle section can be created by adding in atoms that tend to hog extra electrons; the side sections get atoms that tend to give electrons away. Each section separately could conduct electricity, but electrons will refuse to move across the middle section unless the gate is turned on.

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Transistor - William Shockley - Bell Labs - Semiconductor - John Bardeen