Information / Electronics & Computing

MOSFET and CMOS chips

Atalla and Kahng's field-effect transistor (1959) and CMOS logic (1963) became the switch inside nearly every chip.

In 1959 Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs built the first working metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor on silicon. It was easier to shrink and mass-produce than the bipolar transistor, and in 1963 Frank Wanlass paired two complementary types into CMOS logic, which draws power almost only while switching. Almost every processor and memory chip made since consists of MOSFETs, which is why chip density could keep doubling for decades.