Transistor

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The Secret of Scent: Adventures in Perfume and the Science of Smell Luca Turin See book keywords and concepts

Stewart, when cold-called by upstart phone companies to ask whether he wants to switch from AT&T Bell, invariably asks, 'Did you guys invent the transistor? No? The laser then? Neither? Then I'll stick with the company that did!' Dame University, was a specialist in surface science, the chemistry and physics of what happens in the thin layers at the edge of things. Surface science had proved to be the key to solid-state electronics, because all the phenomena that make devices like transistors and diodes work happen at the interfaces between different kinds of semiconductor materials.

Bell Labs' amazing string of successes* (the transistor, the laser, etc.) had planted in the normally saturnine minds of large-company executives the idea that you could do basic research, invent new devices, change(the world, garner a few Nobel Prizes and still make a bundle in the process. Ford therefore set up a proper lab built on Bell Lab rules: modest pay, great facilities, total freedom and flexible teams. Jaklevic and Lambe <^~> Within two years of each other, John Lambe and Robert Jaklevic joined Ford from the universities in which they had done their doctorates.

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By focusing expressly on designing for sustainability and development, ThinkCycle has carried on the legacy of Victor Papanek, the UNESCO designer who, throughout the 1970s, made high-performing, inexpensive devices—such as a transistor radio fashioned from a used can —for the developing world. Papanek refused to patent any of his works, being far more interested in creating a public domain of form and function. To Papanek, a design was most successful when it cost only pennies. Papanek was uncommonly gifted in his ability to ~$ee simple, hybrid high-tech/low-tech solutions to tough problems.

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Early computers with vacuum tubes used too much energy and were "down" most of the time. The transistor, which came along a couple of years after the war, solved both problems. The reliable transistor's descendants made computers cheaper and smaller at an astonishing rate. Today, a thousand dollars will buy a 4 kg (9 lb) computer that has 32 times the memory and speed of computers that cost millions of dollars and filled air-conditioned rooms in the 1940s. Furthermore, the 1940s computer was programmed by hard wiring and its storage memory was a host of magnetic core devices.

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The reflecting tower plays the same role in the optical computer that the transistor does in the silicon machine (a transistor, recall, acts as a switch, which can either let current through or block it). A prototype optical computer element would be an array of thousands of towers on a glass plate, together with lenses to focus the lasers ?one set of lasers for each location on the plate. Thus the optical computer is inherently parallel, since there are always many operations going on at the same time.

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With an alternating current, a transformer will either raise or lower the voltage as it makes the transfer. transistor An electronic device that can work as an amplifier, transforming weak electrical signals into strong ones. It is normally made from silicon or other semiconductors. fa The transistor is the basic device used in miniaturized electronic systems such as portable radios or as a fast switch in computers. UHF (ultra high frequency) Radio waves with frequencies that run between 300,000,000 and 3,000,000,000 hertz. (Compare VHF.

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With an alternating current, a transformer will either raise or lower the voltage as it makes the transfer. transistor An electronic device that can work as an amplifier, transforming weak electrical signals into strong ones. It is normally made from silicon or other semiconductors. fa The transistor is the basic device used in miniaturized electronic systems such as portable radios or as a fast switch in computers. UHF (ultra high frequency) Radio waves with frequencies that run between 300,000,000 and 3,000,000,000 hertz.

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So, you can put more than one transistor on each crystal. And that is what scientists did. Beginning in the 1960s, ways were found to pack more and more transistors onto a given piece of crystal. Such a piece came to be called a chip. A chip is usually a fingernail-sized sliver of silicon, "doped" with impurities in a pattern that enables it to serve as a computer memory or a central processing system or a controller of fuel injection in an automobile. The chip has made possible the incredible increase in power and availability of the personal computer.

The main hardware improvements were the introduction of the transistor to replace the vacuum tube and the introduction of integrated circuits to replace the circuits made up of discrete components such as transistors, resistors, and capacitors. The memories of computers also evolved from bulky cathode-ray tubes and delay lines via magnetic core memories to solid-state memories. Punch cards, like those planned for the Analytical Engine, and punch paper tape were first used for input and output and mass storage. These were eventually replaced by magnetic tape and magnetic disks.

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The reflecting tower plays the same role in the optical computer that the transistor does in the silicon machine (a transistor, recall, acts as a switch, which can either let current through or block it). A prototype optical computer element would be an array of thousands of towers on a glass plate, together with lenses to focus the lasers ?one set of lasers for each location on the plate. Thus the optical computer is inherently parallel, since there are always many operations going on at the same time.

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His father had helped build one of the first transistor computers, a "mobile" computer that took up five semitrailers. For its time, around 1956, it was a revolutionary machine. "My father was already a computer person in the vacuum tube age," Taubenberger said. The Taubenberger family lived in Europe and California, eventually settling in Fairfax County in northern Virginia, part of the sprawling and bland Washington suburbs, after Taubenberger's father was posted at the Pentagon.

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Some examples of a bit of information: whether a light is on or off, whether a switch (like a transistor) is on or off, whether a grain of magnetized iron points up or down, fa The information in a digital computer is stored in the form of bits. boom, sonic The sharp, explosive sound generated by an airplane traveling at speeds greater than the speed of sound. The sonic boom follows the aircraft much like a wake follows a ship. Braille A system of writing and printing for the blind in which arrangements of raised dots representing letters and numbers can be identified by touch.

Devices made from semiconductors, such as the transistor, are the basis of the modern microelectric industry. short circuit An electrical circuit in which a path of very low resistance has been opened, usually accidentally. When the resistance drops, the electric current in the circuit becomes very high, and can cause damage to the circuit and start fires. silicon (siL-i-kon, siL-i-kuhn) A chemical element from which semiconductors are made. It is also used in the manufacture of glass, concrete, brick, and pottery. silicon chip A microchip.

The transistor is the basic device used in miniaturized electronic systems such as portable radios or as a fast switch in computers. UHF (ultra high frequency) Radio waves with frequencies that run between 300,000,000 and 3,000,000,000 hertz. (Compare VHR) universal time The measure of time obtained from the rotation of the earth, also known as Greenwich mean time, after the Greenwich Observatory in England. The world's time standard today is Coordinated Universal Time, which is kept by atomic clocks.

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The tiny transistor "shook the $45 billion electronics industry to its foundations" and wiped out many old, established businesses. The goal of corporate directors, Business Week continued, is "to get the risks of innovation under even tighter control." "The main thing a fellow in my position can do is turn things off," an executive vice president for research and development of a large corporation admitted. "The curse of R&D is letting things go on too long.

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The most effective means was found to be the radio; it seems that every family in Southern Africa has at least one transistor radio... .22 Jet Guns, Mosquitoes, and Marginal Advantages Jet injectors, according to Dr. Paul Wehrle of the University of Southern California School of Medicine, were developed for "more efficient population coverage" and were largely credited for "the apparent success of the smallpox program.

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The reliable transistor's descendants made computers cheaper and smaller at an astonishing rate. Today, a thousand dollars will buy a 4 kg (9 lb) computer that has 32 times the memory and speed of computers that cost millions of dollars and filled air-conditioned rooms in the 1940s. Furthermore, the 1940s computer was programmed by hard wiring and its storage memory was a host of magnetic core devices. It was not until 1956 that a computer language was developed; the keyboard for entering data came 11 years later; and it was another three years before data could be stored on floppy disks.

More recently, governments have realized how important materials science is to them and the economy; this branch of physics has produced the transistor and its descendants, the laser, and the promise of high-temperature superconductivity. Funding for physics has contributed to a remarkable period of growth since the war. Discovery of the Lamb shift in 1947, just before a major conference of leading physicists at Shelter Island, NY, led to the solution of mathematical problems that had surfaced in the study of atoms and subatomic particles.

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Change the transistor in an unmapped behavioral circuit, and it is not surprising to observe unexpected and unwanted results at least some of the time. In addition to prescripdon drugs "that are intended to alter feeling and behavior, there are hundreds more that produce unintended and unwanted adverse effects on behavior. To get a sense of the scope of effects and the number of drugs implicated, consider this list of adverse effects, culled from the disclosure labels of approved drugs.

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The transistor is the basic device used in miniaturized electronic systems such as portable radios or as a fast switch in computers. UHF (ultra high frequency) Radio waves with frequencies that run between 300,000,000 and 3,000,000,000 hertz. (Compare VHF.) VHF (very high frequency) Radio waves with frequencies between 30,000,000 and 300,000,000 hertz. (Compare UHF.) Viking spacecraft A spacecraft launched by NASA that landed on Mars in the late 1970s, sending back photographs and experimental reports about the planet's surface.

Devices made from semiconductors, such as the transistor, are the basis of the modern microelectric industry. short circuit An electrical circuit in which a path of very low resistance has been opened, usually accidentally. When the resistance drops, the electric current in the circuit becomes very high, and can cause damage to the circuit and start fires. silicon A chemical element from which semiconductors are made. It is also used in the manufacture of glass, concrete, brick, and pottery. silicon chip A microchip.

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Today, choosing from a variety of standardized techniques, engineers can easily put millions of transistors on a single microchip no bigger than a postage stamp. By the beginning of the next century, that number will surely be higher. Every time the number rises, the size of electronic devices shrinks and we take another big step in the information revolution. When I was a graduate student in the late 1960s, I did calculations on what was then a state-of-the-art computer at Stanford University, in the middle of the nascent Silicon Valley.

The basic unit of the computer is the transistor, which typically receives an electrical signal and, on the basis of that signal, goes into either an "on" or an "off" state. The basic unit of the brain is the neuron, which takes in signals from thousands of ofhev: neurons and, by a complex process we don't yet understand, integrates those signals and either "fires" (sends nerve signals out to many other neurons) or doesn't. Another difference is that once a conventional computer is wired and given its instructions, it continues to do exactly what it is told ?

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Somewhere in the mid-1980s, a new Xerox or Velcro or even a new transistor was probably invented. We just don't know about it yet.

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