Researched
MOSFET & CMOS (The Chip Switch)
Atalla and Kahng's field-effect transistor (1959) and CMOS logic (1963) became the switch inside nearly every chip.
Open in the interactive tree →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.
Prerequisites
- Transistor1947
- Ultrapure Silicon & Chips1954
- Planar Process1959MOS transistors are made with planar oxide masking and diffusion
Unlocks
- Power Electronics (Thyristor to IGBT)1957-1983The IGBT puts a MOSFET gate on a bipolar power switch.
- DRAM Main Memory1966
- CCD Image Sensor1969
- Microprocessor1971The 4004 was built from silicon-gate MOS transistors
- Quantum Hall Effect1980-1982The electron layer under the gate of a silicon MOSFET
- Flash Memory1984
- CMOS Image Sensor1993It is made on ordinary CMOS chip lines, together with its processing circuits.
- FinFET 3D Transistors2011FinFET reshapes the MOSFET channel into a vertical fin.