Is it the end of the road for the humble transistor?

The transistor is the fundamental building block of all modernelectronic devices

, and is found throughout modern electronic systems. Following its release in the early 1950s the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaperradios,calculators, andcomputers, amongst other things. The transistor is the key active component in practically all modernelectronics, and is considered by many to be one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century. Its importance in today's society rests on its ability to bemass produced using a highly automated process (semiconductor device fabrication) that achieves astonishingly low per-transistor costs.

Although several companies each produce over a billion individually packaged transistors every year, the vast majority of transistors now produced are inintegrated circuits (often shortened toIC,microchipsor simplychips), along withdiodes,resistors,capacitors and otherelectronic components, to produce complete electronic circuits.

Computers today are dominated by two major microprocessor companies namely Intel and AMD, the latest offerings of microprocessors available from Intel for example contains 2,300,000,000 transistors and as a comparison the Intel 4004 chip from 1971 contained 2,300 transistors, the most common Pentium chip from Intel in 1993 contained 3,100,000 transistors. Over the years the technology behind transistors has changed so that they could be made smaller and more could be fitted into microprocessors giving faster processors. The technology continues to make advances in miniaturization in manufacturing transistors and microprocessors.

In 1965 Gordon E Moore the co-founder of Intel wrote a paper describing how the number of transistors in integrated circuits had doubled every year since the invention of the integrated circuit until 1965 and he predicted that the trend would continue for at least ten years. Forty Five years on and the prediction is still somewhat correct and is now commonly known as Moore's Law. In 2005 in an interview with Moore stated that the continuation of the trend cannot continue as transistors would eventually reach the limits of miniaturization atatomiclevels. However experts still insist that Moore's Law will continue for at least another decade or two.

Is it the end of the road for the humble transistor?

By: J. Ferguson

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