John Bardeen, Walter Houser Brattain, William Shockley - three names that are a concept in the history of electronics. The day before Christmas, December 23, 1948, they publish their discovery - the tip transistor, for which they won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956.
Shortly after the end of World War II, the management of Bell Laboratories in the USA created a scientific team whose task was to study the behavior of electrons in solid substances and their possible applications in electrical engineering.
Už v 19.storočí rada vedcov zaoberajúcich sa kryštalografiou objavila dva spôsoby ako meniť elektrickú vodivosť polovodičov zmenou teploty (termistor) a osvetlenia (varistor). From 1904, a crystal detector (crystal) began to be used, which was made of a crystal made of natural galena, the tip of which was touched by a silver-plated wire.
Scientists tried to create a semiconductor element that would be equivalent to a triode. They chose germanium and silicon for research. Since 1931, the so-called band theory, which made it possible to clarify the electrical properties of semiconductors based on energy bands.
Brattain, while experimenting and studying the surface potential of germanium in the vicinity of a tip contact through which an electric current passed, using a point probe, found that in close proximity to both tips, their mutual influence occurs. Together with Bardeen, they discovered through further experiments that the mutual influence of tip contacts makes it possible to realize an amplification effect. The first tip transistor consisted of a germanium wafer, on which two tungsten wires and phosphor bronze were pressed.
Shockley took a different route. He placed the electrodes – collector and emitter – facing each other on opposite sides of a thin germanium plate. He refined his idea to the form of three semiconductor layers of different types of conductivity on one crystal. That's how he discovered the flat-panel transistor.