Reliability Investigations of Bipolar Silicon Phototransistor Arrays for Space Applications

Archived article: written in 2018 and no longer updated. Some information, software or links may be out of date.

In June of 1948, the Bell Telephone Laboratories announced and demonstrated publicly a semiconductor amplifier invented by Bardeen and Brattain, and coined for it the name “transistor”, a contraction of transfer-resistor. That transistor was a point-contact transistor that consisted of a very small piece of germanium with two fine wires contacting its surface, separated from each other. In the following years, Shockley’s classic paper on junction diodes and transistors was published. On the basis of theory, a junction transistor different in structure would have useful properties.