Happy 60th Birthday Mr. Transistor

ScottM

ScottM

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iBazinga!
I remember in the mid-1960 when it was very advanced to have your own small "transistor radio." My sister was given one for Christmas.

Not long after at the age of five, I discovered my interest in electronics when I took it apart. :)
 
I still use '74 series ICs. They're older than me!

What would us engineers do without transistors? I'll tell you, we'd all be working for a railroad or designing bridges or something.

~ Christopher
 
jwriteclub said:
I still use '74 series ICs. They're older than me!

What would us engineers do without transistors? I'll tell you, we'd all be working for a railroad or designing bridges or something.

~ Christopher
Click to expand...

Any interest in a large box of assorted IC's from the '80s? I hate the thought of tossing them in the trash (besides there's lead/tin solder on the leads) but I have no use for this stuff anymore. Probably lots of 74LS plus a bunch of simple PLDs.

What's amazing to me is that in 60 years we went from a single poorly performing laboratory experiment to a gazillion transistor "quad core" CPU. Also interesting is the fact that the first transistors were field effect devices not the bipolar types which dominated the discrete and integrated electronics industry for many years, but FETs (with lots of enhancements) pretty much took over from bipolars several years ago in most applications.
 
Even now is nothing compared to what's gonna happen. Currently, there is research for chips that will put an unimaginable number of transistors on one half-inch chip... like 10^23. That's a lot!
 
The problem with FETs is that a lot of them seem to be CMOS (at least the ones I normally see) and I invariably mess them up before I even get them in the circuit.

Among the interesting developments I have seen recently are the carbon nano-tube radio tuners that Irvine and Berkley have come up with. Also, q-bits. We need q-bits.

~ Christopher
 
KennyFlys said:
Even now is nothing compared to what's gonna happen. Currently, there is research for chips that will put an unimaginable number of transistors on one half-inch chip... like 10^23. That's a lot!
Click to expand...
Moore's law may be approaching its end of life. The expectation is to run out of growth with the 2x increase per annum by about 2020. That is unless there is a break through in technologies. Some of the promising ones are in the area of quantum computing and optical methods.
 
smigaldi said:
Moore's law may be approaching its end of life. The expectation is to run out of growth with the 2x increase per annum by about 2020. That is unless there is a break through in technologies. Some of the promising ones are in the area of quantum computing and optical methods.
Click to expand...

I hope to be retired by then, so someone else will have to worry about it. :D
 
KennyFlys said:
Even now is nothing compared to what's gonna happen. Currently, there is research for chips that will put an unimaginable number of transistors on one half-inch chip... like 10^23. That's a lot!
Click to expand...

10**23 is almost a "mole" (actually, 1/6 of 6.023x10**23). 18 mL of water is a mole of water molecules (stack 18 cubic centimeters on top of each other and that is ~18g of water). Even if each transistor was the size of water molecule, it would be a trick to put that many transistors on 1/2 inch square. is the chip multilayered? Even 3 cc of water is hard to fit on a 1/2 square inch monolayer...
 
Cap'n Jack said:
10**23 is almost a "mole" (actually, 1/6 of 6.023x10**23). 18 mL of water is a mole of water molecules (stack 18 cubic centimeters on top of each other and that is ~18g of water). Even if each transistor was the size of water molecule, it would be a trick to put that many transistors on 1/2 inch square. is the chip multilayered? Even 3 cc of water is hard to fit on a 1/2 square inch monolayer...
Click to expand...
The piece I was watching talked about having molecular-level circuitry effectively painted onto the surface of your car. A simple paint scratch could be repaired by a self-diagnostic capability as well as even change the color of the paint on a whim. The examples given were multi-layered.
 
That is more of a nano-tech "futurization" than a processor.

It might however be possible to use such a setup for swarm processing.

~ Christopher
 
jwriteclub said:
That is more of a nano-tech "futurization" than a processor.

It might however be possible to use such a setup for swarm processing.

~ Christopher
Click to expand...

I was gonna say that. :D
 
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