Abstract
The solid-state revolution, which began in 1947 with the invention of the transistor, was made possible by the ability to make crystalline materials (at that time germanium) sufficiently free of defects that substitutional dopants could overcome the background noise of other defects and control the electronic transport properties of the semiconductor. Since the early 1930’s Bloch, Wilson, and others had laid a sufficient theoretical groundwork in semiconductors so that transistor action could be predicted, demonstrated, and understood even though the point contact transistor had many mysteries associated with it. Figure 1 shows that historical lever that moved the world, the first transistor.
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© 1991 Plenum Press, New York
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Ovshinsky, S.R. (1991). Amorphous Semiconductors for Microelectronics. In: Adler, D., Schwartz, B.B., Silver, M. (eds) Disordered Materials. Institute for Amorphous Studies Series. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-8745-9_47
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