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Saturday, October 2, 2021
CONTINUITY: MOSFET—How the Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor Changed the World
I remember when I first played around with a 3N128 [PDF] metal insulated gate field effect transistor in the mid-1960s. It was the first essentially ideal electronic component I ever encountered. The gate current was essentially zero—just what you needed to charge or discharge its tiny capacitance, and response was almost perfectly linear within its specified range. There was no gate protection: you had to be very careful not to zap the gate with static electricity when the device was not in circuit. Who could have imagined that, half a century later, its silicon descendants would be manufactured in quantities of thousands of trillions per day—the product the most manufactured in human history? The number of MOSFETs made per year is around two million times the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and the number made since their invention now exceeds the highest estimates for the number of grains of sand in all of the beaches of the Earth.
Posted at October 2, 2021 12:36