To the digital age: research labs, start-up companies, and the rise of MOS technology [Book Review]

R oss Bassett has written an excellent book that takes up the story of the transistor where Lillian Hoddeson and I left off in Crystal Fire. Our book focused upon the pioneering work of physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley in the invention and development of point-contact and bipolar junction transistors. But the vast majority of transistors that permeate modern electronics are different devices called metal-oxide-semiconductor fieldeffect transistors—MOSFETs or MOS transistors for short. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, MOS transistors began to replace their bipolar brethren in digital electronic applications. Today millions of them crowd the surfaces of microchips. Shockley was actually trying to invent a field-effect transistor in silicon in 1945, when he initiated the research at Bell Labs that led to Bardeen and Brattain’s point-contact transistor two years later. But the surface-state problem—an irritating layer of electrons on the semiconductor surface that blocks penetration of an electric field into the bulk material—was to thwart his efforts and those of many other researchers for another decade and a half. Meanwhile, Western Electric, General Electric, Sony, Texas Instruments, and several other companies developed and commercialized Shockley’s bipolar transistors, which were starting to replace vacuum tubes by the end of the 1950s. That was also when Bell Labs researchers finally solved the pesky surface-state problem by growing a protective passivating silicon dioxide layer upon the silicon surface.