John Bardeen and the Point‐Contact Transistor
DOI: 10.1063/1.881336
To this day it is not well understood that the bipolar transistor began with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain’s point‐contact transistor. The invention of the point‐contact transistor was a momentous event, not only in itself but even more because of the unimaginable revolution in electronics that followed. This revolution, which continues unabated, had a beginning: Bardeen’s recognition of minority‐carrier injection—that is, his realization that an applied voltage causes valence band holes from the surface region of an n‐type semiconductor material near a metal contact to be injected into the bulk of the material. This realization made the semiconductor suddenly important and no longer just an interesting material to study.
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More about the Authors
Nick Holonyak. University of Illinois, Urbana‐Champaign.
