Devices Go Solid State

This is the story of the birth of the transistor and of the growing understanding of the theory and technology of solid state devices. The transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. They received the Nobel Prize in 1956.The next advance was putting more and more units on a substrate, initiating the age of integrated circuits. Moore’s Law in its original form states that the number of transistors on a substrate will double every year. As the price of computers using transistors plummeted, the number of computers sold rose fast.