One of the more important features of MOSFETs that you didn't mention is that at full saturation, internal resistance is very low, unlike bipolar transistors. This means MOSFETs are capable of switching very high current loads without generating much heat. This allows for the use of MOSFETs to replace electromechanical relays, as well as for high-speed, high-current switching. This is why our "power bricks" of today (including cell phone chargers!) have evolved from heavy devices containing iron-core step-down transformers, into tiny, switching power supplies capable of producing huge amounts of current from a tiny power supply with very little heat and very high efficiency.
You have pretty much described my life. I am a retired electrical engineer, born in 1949. In my education, I was trained to design with vacuum tubes but I never used one. When I was a teenager getting a transistor for your birthday meant you got an AM/FM radio. My grandchildren accept cell phones as commonplace. I will probably leave this life before I have great-great-grandchildren, but I would love to know what they are going to experience.
Hopefully the future is not just technologically superior but socially and individually superior as well. Too much focus has been put into thinking machines that real thinking and social relationships have gone backwards. When people are more excited about the gen phone than the evasive loss of privacy it entails, we are not moving forward but backwards to a totalitarian form of control.
@@waynegarfield6607 no, it will not. Tech will just make life easier, and sometimes will put focus in specific habits, but it will not change the way humans think. We are having the same issues since we start thinking.
One more thing that amazes me besides the count of transistors in modern devices is how incredibly reliable they are. Hundreds of thousands to billions of them, sometimes working 24/7 for years, even decades, without failure. It's insane.
But when they screw up, it can be a nightmare of weird problems without first blaming the MOSFET (without a circuit schematic). Intermittent problems are the worst. Been there, survived that.
@@SpaceCadet4Jesus that's why one of the best computer tools is still a small couple OZ hammer. Start taping board edges or chips, and those thermal intermittent problems show you exactly who is responsible for the errors. Just don't let the customer see you doing. :D
@@cslloyd1 I haven't seen a cold solder joint or cracked joint in probably 25+ years, at least not in computers. I've seen cracked traces on circuit boards. Most motherboard based problems I see are power related. Either excessive power blows a component or two or wipes the BIOS clear, both render the MB trash.
it's entirely a misconception to believe our devices work without failure, in fact our computations fail so constantly you cant run modern software without error correction, and with transistors so small tiny little particles flying through space have enough power to switch a 1 to a 0. which doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize how much a single bit of information can alter a computation. there is a bunch of basic tech support tactics drilled into the brain of everyone who works with computers, which basically boil down to "have you tried turning it off and on again?" because computers so regularly back themselves into a corner that shouldn't be there
I've been around chips since the mid 70s and I even spent over a decade in the semiconductor industry. This was simply the most well informed, balanced and accurate snapshot of the industry to date that I have ever seen. Well done! Bonus points for the references to Colossus, the Regency radio, and the use of RTL in the Apollo guidance computer.
I worked in component engineering as a technician for about 17 years. I cannot stress how good this video was. It mostly hits the high points obviously, but even with all my experience I still learned a thing or two here! Well done guys, bravo! Very impressed!
I'm teaching a class on microcontrollers, it blows my mind that a $5 esp32 micro computer has millions of transistors for such a low price. Much more powerful than my $3,000 desktop from 1996
It blows mind that the esp32 chip set has malware etched into them from the factory. After you flash your program on them, they wait and later when you aren't looking they go out onto the internet and transmit something to a Chinese IP. It's a safe guess that it's saying I'm here, I have this program, and I'm ready to shut off on command from home base.
@@InvestmentJoy run them in a white box after flashing..... But then just let them sit. Forget about it. Then check the logs, you'll see them making a call out that isn't in your program. That call out goes right back to china. I have to imagine is that the chip set's blue print is published "clean" and then it has this extra program cut into it in the production run. Now these chips are everywhere... Forget just development boards, these chips go into everything today. How are customs officials supposed to rip apart appliances, then rip apart the chip set's... Then what? Use a scanning electron microscope to picture it? Then use a simulator to figure out what the extra part cut into the board actually does,?? When people are against back bone like 5g? They really should look at the chips...and nobody does. Think "voting machines" or even just any else..... That how a digital "pearl harbor" gets launched years before December 7th.
ESP32s are rather simple, they range between 25,000 - 150,000 transistors. For a billion of transistors you're looking at an Intel/AMD consumer CPU from around 2010-2012.
I’ve watched/read literally hundreds of educational articles since my childhood that attempt to unfold and relate the great enigma of electronic evolution and I cannot overstate the excellence for how gracefully you communicated these concepts. I feel that your refinement in presentation could justify an entirely new channel demonstrating your process. This is so good, I am sending it to my own students.
@@myrtistaylor5759 He does not go into great detail. That is the idea, it is an overview. He does explain that a transistor can be: *1)* An *amplifier* of a signal - making the signal stronger as it passes through. An example is that a weak radio signal can be made stronger to power a speaker. *2)* A *gate.* A gate is just that, it stops the signal, as a light switch does, or allows the signal to go through, as a light switch does. Using it as a gate it is a _relay._ One circuit switches _on_ and _off_ another. As the _gate_ is either _on_ or _off,_ it is ideal for the binary numbering system which is 0 and 1 _(base 2)._ We use in our everyday use _base 10_ because we have 10 fingers. This is a cumbersome way of using an electronic component as a device is switching _on_ and _off_ a signal, not having it continuous and moving all the way fast as in an analogue form - electricity moves at approx' 1,860 miles per second. It is inefficiently stopping and starting. But here is what makes it feasible. Having *60 billion transistors* in a device that can carry out *two billion* _on_ and _off_ switches per second, _binary_ calculations can be performed amazingly quickly. How does that make a modern digital electronic device work? A computer, _computes,_ constantly calculating. That is what it is doing underneath. The so-called computer devices we use, the function is not computing for the end user - using a web browser on a smart phone is not adding up numbers. To achieve what the end user wants, an amazing level of calculations are performed underneath using the binary, base 2 system. All performed by the Central Processor Unit (CPU) and other components that contain transistors used as *_gates._*
@@johnburns4017 well i think i understood that better than the guy in the video. But if the how and why were explained, like why does a transistor do that when electricity goes through it? I may understand this better.
13:55 I spent 20 years in semiconductor equipment (Applied Materials, Lam Research and smaller independents), but after about 5 years in systems design and integration I came up with a phrase that I still use in my email signatures: "The more I learn about how chips are made, the more I'm convinced it can't be done."
A while ago I got an introduction to the complexities and performance tricks (branch prediction, pipelining, etc) in CPUs, probably only up to the state of the art of the 80s. I cannot fathom how complex they are now. Absolute black magic.
I read in a book a while ago: How more intelligent are you, that less did you understand from the entire picture. That makes me extrem scarred and a bit annoying. That the sentence what I can't forget since 3 to 4 months. I hope that quote did made sense. German native speaker.
@@xXDrocenXx I'm not 100% sure but I suspect you're referring to the Dunning-Kruger effect. I'm not aware of any specific one-liner quip (though maybe I just haven't seen one) but I suspect it would be something like "the more you know, the more you know you don't yet know". Also, its not specifically related to intelligence - even the smartest among us fall prey to its whims. We've seen that a lot over the past year and a half with respect to covid-19. Lots of "doctors" (of physics or chemistry or psychology or whatever) who think they understand more about epidemiology than actual experts like Dr. Fauci in the US and any number of other actual epidemiologists in other countries and the WHO. Physicists generally aren't stupid people, but that doesn't mean they know anything about fields outside of physics. That said, intelligent people do tend to be more interested in learning in general, and therefore are more likely get over that "I know it all!" bump in more fields than people who don't do care about looking into things in detail. That doesn't mean intelligent people do that for _every_ field (and some very smart people just completely keep themselves constrained to their specific field of occupation) but they're more likely to have a broader spectrum of knowledge and therefore more fields where they know how much they don't know.
@@Norsilca - Yep, that's the way I always described it. Or maybe science fiction: Plasma, lasers, transparent aluminum (really!) and materials being laid down in "monolayers" (one atomic thickness). When I left the field, the "CD" (Critical Dimension, or roughly the width of a circuit trace) was 15 nanometers. According to this video, it's now pushing 5 nm. Amazing.
Thank you for a great video on the history of electronics. At 80+ years old, I lived much of the early years that you discussed. I worked at RCA, Texas Instruments, Mostek, and other electronic companies from the late 60's thru the 90's. Knowing where we started, the vacuum tube, to where we are now, is mind boggling.
I grew up in the 50s. You either were a tube guy back then or didn't do electronics. I remember looking forward to the increasing f sub t for hobby transistors. I started with the CK722.
I do equipment engineering and maintenance for a Semiconductor fab in Santa Barbara, that $120M litho tool you showed is insane. I have only heard about it from those who have worked on them. We have 3 stepping exposure tools (like that) that are from the 90's. 2 Nikons and a massive Cannon running OS9. Still running modern processes. But to keep them running smoothly is a constant challenge..
I have not seen a video that recognizes the MOSFET for the world changing apex invention that it was. I use them to make analogue preamps as a hobby. As always, thanks for making this video, we appreciate the effort.
heared (and agree) on transistors in general never heared it in speceficity as MOSFET even if one has to throw in .. Penecelin and chemical fertilizer had such a massive impact .. taking those out of the pictre .. the world we know would be VERY different .. espcialy with a lot less people
People don't appreciate this kind of stuff nearly enough. I'm in my 40s now and I've been lucky enough to witness the progression of tech over the past few decades, and it is absolutely mindblowing how far computing has come. I've got a literal pocket supercomputer, millions of times faster than the computer that put a human on the moon. It does literally _everything_ and connects me to the whole world. I can access the entire sum of human knowledge and history in a few taps. That's a real "holy crap!" moment when you really stop and think about it.
@@Ebut191 No, probably not. The indigenous folks didn't leave a recorded history apart from their songlines, which would change over time. This technology is beyond re-imagined dreamtime stuff.
When I went to school we started with tube theory, and by the time I graduated I ended learning the instruction set for the Intel 4000. The 4000 had a glich so they canceled it and mass produced the 4004. Technology was changes so fast, I worked with the Intel's 8000, 8008, 8080, 286, 386, 486 etc...
386 and 486 were my first 2! It's been a long time and I was a young boy but I remember being excited about going from 100 MHz to 133Mhz. I think that was the jump between the 386 and the 486?
i recall our 386 had a turbo button on front, going from 20MHz to 40! was an amazing fact, found it very usefull to some games, as slowing pc would scale speed game processed - not like today where they just lag with bad FPS, but some got slowmotion, so hard parts you sub-optimize your gaming halfing the clock speed.. Later our 386 got a CD drive also!, still running only VGA (16 colours) not the SVGA.. brings so many memories. Around win95 age, we upgraded to 486, only the 80MHz version as not more was needed, but was a LEAP in technology, going from DOS/Notron and win 3.1 to actual graphical interfaces :-)
As someone who loves learning but sometimes has great difficulty forcing himself through it, I have a lot of respect for how much learning one must do on the front end before making a video like this. Another good one! Keep it up!
The MOSFET is certainly significant and we make use of it everyday but the First big step in solid state was the junction transistor. Going from a vacuum tube to the first solid state device was a really, really giant step.
Wow! I do optical coatings for 193nm ArF excimer lasers! These optical coatings have to be incredibly precise to withstand the incredible power needed to make such tiny lithography features. So cool to have my work relevant to a Curious Droid video!
In the "naughts" I "owned" a 248 nm KrF excimer lithography laser. It was retired shortly after I was in 2009. Viewers may not know that an excimer is an "impossible" molecule formed from an inert element (argon, krypton) and a highly reactive element (e.g. fluorine) under very energetic conditions (electrical discharge). It quickly falls apart, emitting a photon of a characteristic wavelength in the ultraviolet. Even so, the natural spread of wavelengths is enough to cause chromatic aberration, so a grating is used to filter out some photons. The ones that remain must be confined to an environment devoid of oxygen or hydrocarbon vapors to avoid damage to optics. The imaging lens is about the size of a garbage can and designed to operate at a specific altitude. I could go on.
I remember when I was a child getting an electronic experiment kit for Christmas in the early ‘70s. It had all these electronic components on a board and terminals for each component and a big box of wires that allowed you to build all kinds of cool electronic devices. It had a chip that had something like 10 transistors on it🤯.
Was that Radio Shack's 100 in 1 Electronic Projects Kit? I got the next version, the 150 in 1 for Christmas in the mid to late 70's. It had a segmented LED. That and the integrated circuit made it "high speed, low drag" in my book!.
I think you have produced the simplest and clearest explanation of the progression of electronic devices I have seen and would be recommended to view by anyone learning electronics, well done.
A couple of key discoveries and inventions in the early days of the MOSFET were 1) the process recipe for growing gate oxide (SiO2) on silicon with low Si/SiO2 interface defect densities. 2) The self-aligned gate where the gate electrode was deposited before source/drain diffusion (or ion implant) and was used as a mask. The gate had to be able to withstand a very high temperature dopant activation anneal so had to be refractive like TiSi, not aluminum. Without those innovations, MOSFETs would just be laboratory curiosities.
They had to figure out materials that not only had the desired electrical properties, but also could be cheaply added as layers and subjected to the harsh conditions during chip construction.
Thanks for sharing. Progress in the electronics industry is mind blowing. I studied electronics at diploma level in the 80s and 90s. What I learned then is still relevant in how digital logic is applied in the design of electronic circuits, but the process of miniaturization to the tiny scale devices we have now is truly incredible.
A little history I learned while doing a school report: Schockly's original design worked fine - right up until the moment when AT&T attorneys did a standard patent search. Imagine their surprise when they found that his idea had been patented ten years earlier, by a college professor. They had no choice but to hand-build the early point-contact transistors to fulfil contracts.
@@GodzillaGoesGaga Can't remember the name, but it was Polish and he got the patent in '38. It was 20 years ago that I went BACK to school :) but I'm pretty sure the book I got that from was called "Crystal Fire".
You cannot patent an idea. Only inventions can receive patents. A thoughtful person would realize the silliness of the idea patenting of ideas. The patent office would be totally overwhelmed with ideas people wanted patented. The silly story of some unknown professor and his "patented idea" is simply another leftist attempt to discredit Shockley. Hey! I need to get that idea patented.
@@billythomas8749 A worked-out, proven idea can be patented and this is a verified story, you goof. I worked for AT&T. The point-contact transistor was used for early production because they couldn't get the patent worked out for the superior Shockley design.
Isn't it kind of insane that we've developed one specific piece of tech so hardcore that literally they only thing that will stop us is the physical size of the building blocks of material we use to build it. Like that's just insane to me
@@Buffalo_Soldier is it possible in our lifetime? Maybe. It's just that I've noticed physics tends to get, funnkkaaayy, when you get extremely small. To go smaller than an atom for transistors would require a few leaps in innovation rather then steady improvement. Perhaps we'll get lucky and someone will discover such an innovation tho.
@SOUL SEEKER We haven't really advanced mainstream operating systems since the 1970s. They're all still fundamentally based on timeshare OSes designed to protect the computer from the user. And programming languages haven't really advanced since the 1980s invented OOP. It *looks* more cool, but there's a reason Windows 11 still runs Windows 3 software without change.
wow that was great. when i left the military in the late '80s i got a job at a semiconductor plant. it was hard to explain to people how a chip was actually made. you had to see it to appreciate it. the multiple layers stacked on top of it each other in a scale we couldn't even see with our naked eyes. anyway thanks for this.
electronics is such that it cannot be seen with eyes, cannot be heard with ears and cannot be sensed with touch, smell, etc, etc unlike mechanical, etc, hence it is impossible to know, consider the failure of electronics before, prior they fail unlike the easy mechanical, etc, etc stuff
A fantastic Video! I have to say you (and your team?) are an excellent communicator. I am an engineer in business development and as such I have to convey technical subjects to non technical people - on a daily basis. I am in awe of what you are able to do with a 15 minute video here!
I really liked this explanation and history of the FET. Very well done and informative. I even liked the fact that it was included that it was a "mistake" discovery, as a lot of documentaries/articles fail to mention this tidbit of information. Just goes to show that there really isn't a "failure", but just another way it can't be done and to keep on trucking, as it may happen that you find the answer(s) to questions you didn't know.
7nm transistors are not actually 7nm across - the number of the transistor size stopped meaning anything physical around 14nm. There's a lot more to each process node than just the length of each transistor. Source: I work at one of the companies mentioned in the video - I see images of (and measure) them on a daily basis.
It's supposed to be the feature size though what manufacturers call a feature is not consistent so never compare for example Intel's 7nm to somebody else's
@@korakys That could be the case - I don't remember exactly, and being sort of half in production and half in research, we deal with many process nodes all at once, so it makes it harder to keep track. Right now for instance, we work on at least 4 process nodes at once - everything from high volume production to 2 or 3 nodes in the future that are under development. Honestly the internal code names mean more to me than the #nm names do.
The best documentary channel on the YT. Watching these alone makes up for paying your internet bill. This is also the closest I get in terms of overall presentation and vibes to the old pre-reality bs Discovery Channel. Many thanks for the educational videos, love them!
I hardly understood anything you talked about but, I really enjoyed learning just how limited I am. I'm 73 and remember getting my first GE transistor radio and strapping it to my bicycle to listen to KILT radio in Houston, TX. Rock and Roll on the bicycle was my salvation in my little town of La Marque, TX. south of Houston.
I’m 55 and have no idea what he’s talking about but I do find it interesting. I’m an old school mechanical guy, so I’ll build the physical hardware and let the young people bring it to life with their computers and electronics. Greetings from Michigan!
@es pretty sureDNA molecules are bigger than transistors? They consost of at least hundreds of atoms while a transistor is like less than 30 in diameter or so?
@@johnuferbach9166 i didn't mean 'physically' smaller. DNA macromolecules consist of millions of atoms, and are very large compared to many others, or to those transistors. The principal difference is, that _every_ atom or aminoacidic group there performs a certain function. And our semiconductor technology is still quite far from this fine level.
Man this video was so cool. I had to pause it and dive through wikipedia and articles for almost everything you talked about, so much it was fascinating. Tnaks!
The MOSFET was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. It was a breakthrough in power electronics. Generations of MOSFETs enabled power designers to achieve performance and density levels not possible with bipolar transistors.
Thank you for making this video. I became an electronics technician years ago and this stuff blew my mind. It’s truly remarkable how far we have come so fast. We’re not done yet.
Yes, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments invented the Integrated Circuit and Robert Noyce of Intel made it practical using the Planer Transistor he previously invented. They share the patent for the integrated circuit.
@@skeletoncrew539 I made them by HAND working for a company called "Hybridine" in Irvine......in 1972!. Microscopes that did soldering jump wires, and algebraic formula's for testing . Remembered that equation I used for years afterward!
@@Dwightstjohn-fo8ki If we taught this in school today we might have more understanding (and appreciation) for the gadgets that we simply cannot "Live without". After training in electronics at a young age I was stunned to realize that the vast majority of people didn't know how a television worked, yet spent most of their spare time sitting in front of one.
This by far is the most fascinating video I’ve watched on this channel since (as the author states) mosfet affects every aspects of our modern lives. Thanks for this video. Enjoyed it immensely.
A very informative video! One note/nit -- the slide you use at 13:52 isn't about microprocessor or MOSFET photolithography, but instead about how microfluidic devices are made. And don't get me wrong, microfluidics are super-cool -- but they handle liquid instead of electrons (;
Yeah, very nice slide but not really about MOSFET but rather lab-on-a -chip thingies. Out of curiosity I paused the video and looked at it closer. I came to the same conclusion and then I started ploughing through the comments to see if I was the only one that noticed. Still a great video of course.
Nice presentation , I'm in my mid 60's now so growing up in the 60's and having a father that was an electronic engineer I got to watch the evolution of electronics fairly closely and it has been pretty amazing how far things have come in my lifetime . One thing I remember hearing on a few occasions is "we have hit the limit of physics" on things like layer thickness and others but layer thickness is the one that I find the most funny because the claimed limit keeps changing . They really should just say it's the limit of current technology rather than claim it's a limit of physics , luckily not everyone believes in limits and they seek to break those supposed limits . From what I hear bacteria is being used to etch the smallest of layers which seems interesting , I would love to see that demonstrated . The next step I think will be 3D printing circuits and insulators to reduce distance traveled internally for operations and get layer thickness down even more , an entire computer could theoretically be printed into a single chip in almost any shape you wanted and would only require limited external connections .
Bacteria are orders of magnitude larger than the smallest layers so... In regards to the limits, yeah physics does throw curveballs when you get into the single digit nanometer scale. As in quantam tunnelling of electrons and such, high energy photons from general background radiation flipping mosfets, which is why clever error correcting code is needed. And now clever architectures to further increase the performance of modern chip designs. These days the whole 5...4...3 nm nomenclature is just marketing jargon, to indicate progress in computing power, not the actual size of the circuits that are being made. As it stands, the chips are already printed in 3D, just go take a look at how RAM and SSD's work.
This is a fantastic overview on the subject. All my favorite things in one video. Watching this was a nice break from cutting open old mental can ICs, and de-capsulating old epoxy ones which I normally do to gather a similar understanding. This technology is mind-blindingly awesome.
What a wonderful channel you produce. I remember as a teenager in the late 1980s getting my first real, legit hifi stereo amp it’s was a MOSFET amp and I had no idea what that meant but the technician was incredulous a teenager like me was getting a mosfet amp and I think he was actually jealous. I still use that amp today over 3o years later it’s never failed and sounds incredible I’ve even used and sold Macintosh amps that didn’t sound nearly as good. MOSFET was and is real! Thanks for the elucidation finally
I know it might sound silly but you was the first person to didactly and explicitly tell me the basic difference among bipolar transistor (works based upon current level applyed to base) and FET transistor (works based upon gate voltage level). So obvious and you did open my eyes ... after years working with electronics. Thank You! Thanks Nord VPN for sponsoring this channel!
Congrats on your 1.01 million viewers. You've done an admirable job getting there and looking forward to watching you get to your 10 millionth viewer! Edit, 10 millionth subscriber! Thanks for the heads up TTG!
I can look in literally any direction sitting in my home and I would have trouble to NOT find something that has some sort of transistor in it now. "But what about straight up to the ceiling?" Yep, LED lightbulb, has a microchip in it. MOSFETs truly have changed EVERYTHING.
that was.. mindblowing. the fact that modern Tech is able to put billions of Transistors into such a device is just insane. great video. keep going! greetings from Germany✌🏼
Takes me back to my 1970s to early Air Force days in PMEL calibrating and repairing test equipment. Back in the days of vacuum tubes, hybrid circuits using both transistors and tubes or as our British friends call valves.
Ken Schaefer : I had a chance to go into PMEL in 1982,but chose instead to go into F-15 avionics. I think I would've gotten more out of being in PMEL than F-15 Avionics. But then again,who really does component level repairs these days? Did they teach you how to do circuit board repairs without schematics?
@@ebayerr Some of the equipment didn't even have Technical Orders so we had to use manufacturers manuals about 25% of the time. And those often had block diagrams and often no schematics. Yeah we had to identify circuitry at times by taking measurements. I taught PMEL for 5 years. When I started school in PMEL we didn't have calculators and worked with numbers with up to 6 or 7 decimal places. Used a lot of logarithms for calculations as slide rules were not near accurate enough.
@@kenschaefer7625: Very cool Ken. As it turned out,I had gotten stationed at Kadena AB,Okinawa and that little island was an audiophile's dream come true. And having your kind of skills would've been nice to know. Check out the video I posted from Kadena in 1986.The base commander gave permission for some airmen I knew to put on a little concert on base.
A great piece, with the extra length reflecting a more in-depth discussion than you usually do. One minor point: around 4:30 you articulately discuss the difference between a transistor and FET, viz the transistor is modulated by base current whilst FETs are modulated by gate voltage. Moving to 6:50 you state that a valve (tube) is similar to a transistor. Er I’d think it’s more correct to say a valve is similar to a FET. Reason being is that each is modulated by applied voltage, whilst the transistor (junction transistor) is modulated by current. Though I realise that this would complicate the flow of the story…
Ah okay this video is about audio. I was hoping for some nice, new visuals. Anyway, the difference between a tube and a FET seems to be the doping which can compensate the space charge. With a FET you can define a working point so to say by doping. Without a field there will be an equal density of electrons. With a tube electrons repel each other an like to slam in the metal electrodes. Around this working point we can enhance the flow by making the gate positive ( NPN transistor ) or make the gate negative to deplete. The effect is more pronounced on the semiconductor-insulator bandgap step then in the middle. This limits the gate width similar to the grid pitch in a tube. I like Paul trap or electron lenses which by alternating fields create an effective confining field an work like doping in a tube. But for some reason this is only used in CRT -- where you don't switch on and off, but left and right.
A FET is a Field Effect *Transistor* ! Are you trying differentiate between bipolar transistors, FET's and the various MOSFET's? (enhanced, depletion, n-channel, p-channel, J-FET's, etc) and other transistors? I had an EE lab or two measuring the properties of several FET's.Unfortunately, My lab partner and I mixed up a regular FET with a J-FET.and screwed up the lab. Otherwise you have some good points. A bipolar transistor is a current amplifier. Tubes and FET's are voltage amplifiers.
@@nineball039 I try to unify transistors. I think the only difference between J-FET and MOSFET is the allowed voltages on the gate. With non finFET MOSFETs the substrate acts like a J-FET. To me it looks like J-FETs can achieve wide channels, but on the other hand the depletion region seems to be wider than the SO2 layer width in a MOSFET and thus signal voltages probably need to be larger. I don't understand why GaAs J-FETs for digital circuits can be fast.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt What's the difference between a J-FET and a 'regular' FET? (Measuring the parameters of both was a main part of our EE lab in the late 1970's).
@@nineball039 MOSFET has an insulator to insulate the gate. Only Silicon can form a defect free Si -- SiO2 interface. And even without defects there can be interface states which are also not so many on that chemical. With GaAs you cannot do it, so you insulate Gate and channel by means of intrinsic GaAs and a the depletion zone of a diode. Ah, I love nip diodes .. sorry. So there can be no enhancement mode JFET .. you would loose the depletion zone.
Although the TV replaced the radio for most people, I stuck with our radio. It had six, maybe seven, tubes and was a floor model, with a 10 " electrodynamic speaker. Radio was still strong in 1950 with lots of great programs.
Lovely video! You should consider doing a lot more of these. Digging down in the 'small' yet amazing inventions of the 20th Century, that truly changed our life.
Wow, what an exceptionally interesting video. I knew quite a lot about transistors but didn't know too much about their history and how they are made. This was very informative 👍
If anyone is interested in video games, this is the point of historical departure in the game series Fallout. They never invented the transistor, and despite reaching 2077 before nuclear annihilation (after which the games take place) everything remains valve-based. So massive TVs and radios, dot-matrix computer terminals etc. The 1950s aesthetic and Red Scare is also a big trope in the game so it's certainly an aesthetic choice too, but I've always found it an interesting thing to ponder. It certainly is the most impactful invention of the 20th century!
Mr Droid all you videos are some of the best anywhere on the web. I especially love you Project Apollo series, again they are so good to watch, and agree Landing man on the moon was the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th Century.
Excellent video! I have been a fan of home computing since I saw my first one in 1982 and it boggles my mind how memory and processing power has gotten smaller, cheaper, faster and cooler.
@@eldencw Yes, but it’s not actually an equivalent circuit. You can’t easily just substitute an IGBT with a bipolar and FET. The operation is unique. Equivalent circuits used in documentation are for conceptual understanding of the operation, not true operation.
I play my electric guitar through a fuzz pedal with three germanium transistors. Then it goes through a MOFET overdrive pedal and then into high tech microprocessor controlled digital reverb and delay with premium FET buffers and preamp, all before it gets to my 50 watt stereo vacuum tube head. Musicians made all these technical devices into musical instruments that are still used and loved today for their sound, warts and all. Meanwhile the digital industry attempts to reproduce those old sounds, from crusty old tape echo machines to tube distortion and dynamic effects. The tube industry nearly died if not for the venerable tube amp and pedal Guru Mike Mathews of EHX. The guitar pedal industries managed to get obsolete analog Bucket Brigade chips made again, just so they could make the classic Analog Delay pedals again. The history of these devises is fascinating to me being a techie and a musician. Bravo for good story telling. I'll subscribe.
Just a FYI: the flow chart at 14:00 is describing the manufacture of non-electric microfluidic devices, as used in fuel cells, microbiology etc. It still illustrates the idea of photolithography, but it's not describing the process of making ICs like MOSFETs.
We seem to progress in oddly staggered ways. In some ways, we’re still closer to cavemen, but in others, we might as well be super advanced aliens on Star Trek!
Our civilization produces increasingly smarter individuals at its margins thanks to the work of each previous generation but the vast majority doesn't learn nor progresses.
Yeah especially the last image with some hoses attached to the completed device is quite an obvious sign that we're not dealing with semiconductor manufacturing.
You know, that 7nm TSMC process...nothing in the transistor is actually 7nm in size. At this point, it's basically all marketing speak, and has no actual connection to anything in silicon. AFAIK, the last time the node size was the actual "feature" size was at 22nm.
Very good overview and review. But I think the Colossus was actually built outside of BP although it was delivered to BP because it was to be deployed there. And I think there were two distinct Colossus machines: one was pretty fixed-purpose, but the second was truly an advance and deserves its place as a first in computer history. Well done, UK! ☺️
I didn't know I needed this RUclips channel in my life, it got suggested, I clicked to see what content you had and now I comment and subscribe, good work team
My father had (and maybe still has) a transistor radio much like the ones you showed, maybe even that same brand. He had a leather case to go with it. When I was a very young kid in the 70s, he used to brag about it to me all the time, though at the time I couldn't quite see what was so great about it.
Dennard's scaling hadn't ended back then, so you'd see chips double in clockspeed in just a couple years. going from 8mhz to 15mhz to 33mhz to 66mhz. Nowdays chips have hit that tdp limit and IBM, AMD, and Intel haven't been able to break past ~5ghz (IBM still makes chips though they are for the mainframe market)
Asome video! Thanks! 😃 Interesting, in the Dutch news ASML is always mentioned as a chip-manufacturer, but actually they make the machines which can produce chips. Now I know! 😉
The MOSFET was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. It was a breakthrough in power electronics. Generations of MOSFETs enabled power designers to achieve performance and density levels not possible with bipolar transistors.
1:02 I feel it's worth mentioning that all of those "512gb" microSD cards you showed were fake/counterfeit cards. A proper one will cost around $50 at the least. Fake microSD cards are a huge problem
There's also indoor plumbing. Also not a 20th century invention but it may have had a larger impact on standards of living than any other single thing!
That is a fascinating history of the development and use of solid-state devices. I remember how thrilled I was in the early 60s to have my pocket 9V AM radio with its 8 or 9 transistors and a jack for an earphone, so I could listen to Top 40 AM rock radio around the time of the British invasion(1964 - 1967). Later I marveled at the use of MOSFET front-end voltmeters that had the high input impedance necessary for making voltage measurements in RF circuits, where no loading of the circuit was necessary. Previously, we had to use vacuum tube voltmeters(VTVMs) for that purpose and they were often barely stable enough to get good measurements.
@@dzejrid And is that not where we are today and have been for a while? I think only a small fraction of a percent of humans - and that is probably putting it generously - really understand to the basic core how for instance a modern smartphone really works. We all use them, but practically noone, my self included, really know how they work. We just put the tip of a finger on a glass plate on one side of the smartphone, and actual magic happens. It does what we think it should do, like waving a magic stick. Even without having to say any magic words.
@@RobinTheBot I disagree. Unless you're born with a brain wired for engineering, you're not going to 'get it' (unless you happen to live many lifetimes - and by then the pace of technology would outrun your non-engineering brain).
I enjoyed this very much, Paul, thank you. I was a computer/engineering systems technician for many years. Most of my bosses hadn't a clue, and if they did, they'd lose it.
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lithography next .
Not dealing with that company again.
Kinda sad to see people in tech pushing VPN BS.
E-lithography can do sub-10 nm as it is using electrons instead of light. Might help us a bit more.
It's a 2 year plus 4 month free contract mate.
One of the more important features of MOSFETs that you didn't mention is that at full saturation, internal resistance is very low, unlike bipolar transistors. This means MOSFETs are capable of switching very high current loads without generating much heat. This allows for the use of MOSFETs to replace electromechanical relays, as well as for high-speed, high-current switching. This is why our "power bricks" of today (including cell phone chargers!) have evolved from heavy devices containing iron-core step-down transformers, into tiny, switching power supplies capable of producing huge amounts of current from a tiny power supply with very little heat and very high efficiency.
Would be ABSOLUTELY AWESOME if you offered some diy, troubleshooting, and teardown electronics videos!
Why they replaced mercury arc rectifiers for ac to dc conversion in large setups
@@Phil-D83 but mercury arc rectifiers are so pretty when operating though, haha
@@keithyinger3326 the glass ones; yes.
Great insight my dude 👍
You have pretty much described my life. I am a retired electrical engineer, born in 1949. In my education, I was trained to design with vacuum tubes but I never used one. When I was a teenager getting a transistor for your birthday meant you got an AM/FM radio. My grandchildren accept cell phones as commonplace. I will probably leave this life before I have great-great-grandchildren, but I would love to know what they are going to experience.
Neural interfaces, and optical electronics.
freeze your brain so they can put it in a robot body like robocop
Hopefully the future is not just technologically superior but socially and individually superior as well. Too much focus has been put into thinking machines that real thinking and social relationships have gone backwards. When people are more excited about the gen phone than the evasive loss of privacy it entails, we are not moving forward but backwards to a totalitarian form of control.
@@waynegarfield6607 no, it will not. Tech will just make life easier, and sometimes will put focus in specific habits, but it will not change the way humans think. We are having the same issues since we start thinking.
Starvation due to overpopulation?
One more thing that amazes me besides the count of transistors in modern devices is how incredibly reliable they are. Hundreds of thousands to billions of them, sometimes working 24/7 for years, even decades, without failure. It's insane.
But when they screw up, it can be a nightmare of weird problems without first blaming the MOSFET (without a circuit schematic). Intermittent problems are the worst. Been there, survived that.
@@SpaceCadet4Jesus that's why one of the best computer tools is still a small couple OZ hammer. Start taping board edges or chips, and those thermal intermittent problems show you exactly who is responsible for the errors. Just don't let the customer see you doing. :D
@@williamallen7836 I used a heat gun and cold spray to diagnose potential component failures.
@@cslloyd1 I haven't seen a cold solder joint or cracked joint in probably 25+ years, at least not in computers. I've seen cracked traces on circuit boards. Most motherboard based problems I see are power related. Either excessive power blows a component or two or wipes the BIOS clear, both render the MB trash.
it's entirely a misconception to believe our devices work without failure, in fact our computations fail so constantly you cant run modern software without error correction, and with transistors so small tiny little particles flying through space have enough power to switch a 1 to a 0. which doesn't sound like a big deal until you realize how much a single bit of information can alter a computation. there is a bunch of basic tech support tactics drilled into the brain of everyone who works with computers, which basically boil down to "have you tried turning it off and on again?" because computers so regularly back themselves into a corner that shouldn't be there
I've been around chips since the mid 70s and I even spent over a decade in the semiconductor industry. This was simply the most well informed, balanced and accurate snapshot of the industry to date that I have ever seen. Well done! Bonus points for the references to Colossus, the Regency radio, and the use of RTL in the Apollo guidance computer.
I started my EE career in early 1972. I still have some Fairchild ul914 and ul923 RTL devices.
The Colossus was not the first electronic, digital computer; the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was.
How many times were we techs screwed over by suits in our careers.....you left out?
So what is stopping us from using X rays from doing the photo etch instead of far UV?
@@kleetus92 When you come up with a photoresist mask that can stop an x-ray, please let us know.
I worked in component engineering as a technician for about 17 years. I cannot stress how good this video was. It mostly hits the high points obviously, but even with all my experience I still learned a thing or two here! Well done guys, bravo! Very impressed!
I'm teaching a class on microcontrollers, it blows my mind that a $5 esp32 micro computer has millions of transistors for such a low price. Much more powerful than my $3,000 desktop from 1996
It blows mind that the esp32 chip set has malware etched into them from the factory. After you flash your program on them, they wait and later when you aren't looking they go out onto the internet and transmit something to a Chinese IP.
It's a safe guess that it's saying I'm here, I have this program, and I'm ready to shut off on command from home base.
@@dhardy6654 that's very interesting, never heard that before
@@InvestmentJoy run them in a white box after flashing..... But then just let them sit. Forget about it. Then check the logs, you'll see them making a call out that isn't in your program. That call out goes right back to china.
I have to imagine is that the chip set's blue print is published "clean" and then it has this extra program cut into it in the production run. Now these chips are everywhere... Forget just development boards, these chips go into everything today. How are customs officials supposed to rip apart appliances, then rip apart the chip set's... Then what? Use a scanning electron microscope to picture it? Then use a simulator to figure out what the extra part cut into the board actually does,??
When people are against back bone like 5g? They really should look at the chips...and nobody does. Think "voting machines" or even just any else.....
That how a digital "pearl harbor" gets launched years before December 7th.
ESP32s are rather simple, they range between 25,000 - 150,000 transistors. For a billion of transistors you're looking at an Intel/AMD consumer CPU from around 2010-2012.
@@dhardy6654 yu ar karect et haz inbilt malvare .
I’ve watched/read literally hundreds of educational articles since my childhood that attempt to unfold and relate the great enigma of electronic evolution and I cannot overstate the excellence for how gracefully you communicated these concepts. I feel that your refinement in presentation could justify an entirely new channel demonstrating your process. This is so good, I am sending it to my own students.
On RUclips it is common to see complete amatures make vids, putting highly paid professional presenters to shame.
thank you for doing a dive into the difference of tansistor vs fet and also silicon chip manufacture. do another just on chip making plesae
I don't understand a thing he's talking about. He's not explaining how transistor works or why it works. I'm a mechanical guy not electrical.
@@myrtistaylor5759
He does not go into great detail. That is the idea, it is an overview. He does explain that a transistor can be:
*1)* An *amplifier* of a signal - making the signal stronger as it passes through. An example is that a weak radio signal can be made stronger to power a speaker.
*2)* A *gate.* A gate is just that, it stops the signal, as a light switch does, or allows the signal to go through, as a light switch does. Using it as a gate it is a _relay._ One circuit switches _on_ and _off_ another.
As the _gate_ is either _on_ or _off,_ it is ideal for the binary numbering system which is 0 and 1 _(base 2)._ We use in our everyday use _base 10_ because we have 10 fingers. This is a cumbersome way of using an electronic component as a device is switching _on_ and _off_ a signal, not having it continuous and moving all the way fast as in an analogue form - electricity moves at approx' 1,860 miles per second. It is inefficiently stopping and starting.
But here is what makes it feasible. Having *60 billion transistors* in a device that can carry out *two billion* _on_ and _off_ switches per second, _binary_ calculations can be performed amazingly quickly.
How does that make a modern digital electronic device work? A computer, _computes,_ constantly calculating. That is what it is doing underneath. The so-called computer devices we use, the function is not computing for the end user - using a web browser on a smart phone is not adding up numbers. To achieve what the end user wants, an amazing level of calculations are performed underneath using the binary, base 2 system. All performed by the Central Processor Unit (CPU) and other components that contain transistors used as *_gates._*
@@johnburns4017 well i think i understood that better than the guy in the video. But if the how and why were explained, like why does a transistor do that when electricity goes through it? I may understand this better.
13:55 I spent 20 years in semiconductor equipment (Applied Materials, Lam Research and smaller independents), but after about 5 years in systems design and integration I came up with a phrase that I still use in my email signatures: "The more I learn about how chips are made, the more I'm convinced it can't be done."
A while ago I got an introduction to the complexities and performance tricks (branch prediction, pipelining, etc) in CPUs, probably only up to the state of the art of the 80s. I cannot fathom how complex they are now. Absolute black magic.
I read in a book a while ago: How more intelligent are you, that less did you understand from the entire picture.
That makes me extrem scarred and a bit annoying.
That the sentence what I can't forget since 3 to 4 months. I hope that quote did made sense. German native speaker.
it is mind blowing and pushes the realm of comprehension
@@xXDrocenXx I'm not 100% sure but I suspect you're referring to the Dunning-Kruger effect. I'm not aware of any specific one-liner quip (though maybe I just haven't seen one) but I suspect it would be something like "the more you know, the more you know you don't yet know".
Also, its not specifically related to intelligence - even the smartest among us fall prey to its whims. We've seen that a lot over the past year and a half with respect to covid-19. Lots of "doctors" (of physics or chemistry or psychology or whatever) who think they understand more about epidemiology than actual experts like Dr. Fauci in the US and any number of other actual epidemiologists in other countries and the WHO. Physicists generally aren't stupid people, but that doesn't mean they know anything about fields outside of physics.
That said, intelligent people do tend to be more interested in learning in general, and therefore are more likely get over that "I know it all!" bump in more fields than people who don't do care about looking into things in detail. That doesn't mean intelligent people do that for _every_ field (and some very smart people just completely keep themselves constrained to their specific field of occupation) but they're more likely to have a broader spectrum of knowledge and therefore more fields where they know how much they don't know.
@@Norsilca - Yep, that's the way I always described it. Or maybe science fiction: Plasma, lasers, transparent aluminum (really!) and materials being laid down in "monolayers" (one atomic thickness).
When I left the field, the "CD" (Critical Dimension, or roughly the width of a circuit trace) was 15 nanometers. According to this video, it's now pushing 5 nm. Amazing.
Thank you for a great video on the history of electronics. At 80+ years old, I lived much of the early years that you discussed. I worked at RCA, Texas Instruments, Mostek, and other electronic companies from the late 60's thru the 90's. Knowing where we started, the vacuum tube, to where we are now, is mind boggling.
I grew up in the 50s. You either were a tube guy back then or didn't do electronics. I remember looking forward to the increasing f sub t for hobby transistors. I started with the CK722.
I do equipment engineering and maintenance for a Semiconductor fab in Santa Barbara, that $120M litho tool you showed is insane. I have only heard about it from those who have worked on them. We have 3 stepping exposure tools (like that) that are from the 90's. 2 Nikons and a massive Cannon running OS9. Still running modern processes. But to keep them running smoothly is a constant challenge..
I have not seen a video that recognizes the MOSFET for the world changing apex invention that it was. I use them to make analogue preamps as a hobby. As always, thanks for making this video, we appreciate the effort.
Is there such a thing as a digital preamp?
Because it's taken for granted.
@@BoboButYouCanCallMeTom Lol, I guess there isn't, the thought of encountering a high Z digital square wave input made me laugh though.
History guy did a vid
heared (and agree) on transistors in general never heared it in speceficity as MOSFET
even if one has to throw in .. Penecelin and chemical fertilizer had such a massive impact .. taking those out of the pictre ..
the world we know would be VERY different .. espcialy with a lot less people
People don't appreciate this kind of stuff nearly enough. I'm in my 40s now and I've been lucky enough to witness the progression of tech over the past few decades, and it is absolutely mindblowing how far computing has come. I've got a literal pocket supercomputer, millions of times faster than the computer that put a human on the moon. It does literally _everything_ and connects me to the whole world. I can access the entire sum of human knowledge and history in a few taps. That's a real "holy crap!" moment when you really stop and think about it.
It comes with pitfalls though. There is so much information out there that it becomes hard to determine truth from falsehood
But still we can't run Quake RTX with a constant 200FPS 😄
There's a lot of research papers that are behind closed doors though.
Do you have access to the collective knowledge of indigenous peoples of Australia,
@@Ebut191 No, probably not. The indigenous folks didn't leave a recorded history apart from their songlines, which would change over time. This technology is beyond re-imagined dreamtime stuff.
When I went to school we started with tube theory, and by the time I graduated I ended learning the instruction set for the Intel 4000. The 4000 had a glich so they canceled it and mass produced the 4004. Technology was changes so fast, I worked with the Intel's 8000, 8008, 8080, 286, 386, 486 etc...
386 and 486 were my first 2! It's been a long time and I was a young boy but I remember being excited about going from 100 MHz to 133Mhz. I think that was the jump between the 386 and the 486?
God, the 286 sucked.
@@BGraves The 4004 had a clock speed of 750 KHZ, I was excited to go to 1 MHZ.
i recall our 386 had a turbo button on front, going from 20MHz to 40! was an amazing fact, found it very usefull to some games, as slowing pc would scale speed game processed - not like today where they just lag with bad FPS, but some got slowmotion, so hard parts you sub-optimize your gaming halfing the clock speed.. Later our 386 got a CD drive also!, still running only VGA (16 colours) not the SVGA.. brings so many memories.
Around win95 age, we upgraded to 486, only the 80MHz version as not more was needed, but was a LEAP in technology, going from DOS/Notron and win 3.1 to actual graphical interfaces :-)
@@sorn1234 I always thought the Turbo button was funny. When would you decide NOT to turn on the Turbo button?
As someone who loves learning but sometimes has great difficulty forcing himself through it, I have a lot of respect for how much learning one must do on the front end before making a video like this. Another good one! Keep it up!
The MOSFET is certainly significant and we make use of it everyday but the First big step in solid state was the junction transistor.
Going from a vacuum tube to the first solid state device was a really, really giant step.
Wow! I do optical coatings for 193nm ArF excimer lasers! These optical coatings have to be incredibly precise to withstand the incredible power needed to make such tiny lithography features. So cool to have my work relevant to a Curious Droid video!
In the "naughts" I "owned" a 248 nm KrF excimer lithography laser. It was retired shortly after I was in 2009. Viewers may not know that an excimer is an "impossible" molecule formed from an inert element (argon, krypton) and a highly reactive element (e.g. fluorine) under very energetic conditions (electrical discharge). It quickly falls apart, emitting a photon of a characteristic wavelength in the ultraviolet. Even so, the natural spread of wavelengths is enough to cause chromatic aberration, so a grating is used to filter out some photons. The ones that remain must be confined to an environment devoid of oxygen or hydrocarbon vapors to avoid damage to optics. The imaging lens is about the size of a garbage can and designed to operate at a specific altitude. I could go on.
I remember when I was a child getting an electronic experiment kit for Christmas in the early ‘70s. It had all these electronic components on a board and terminals for each component and a big box of wires that allowed you to build all kinds of cool electronic devices. It had a chip that had something like 10 transistors on it🤯.
Same here.
Was that Radio Shack's 100 in 1 Electronic Projects Kit? I got the next version, the 150 in 1 for Christmas in the mid to late 70's. It had a segmented LED. That and the integrated circuit made it "high speed, low drag" in my book!.
Yeah, and the chemistry one. Combine the two and you had a remote bomb making kit...
Sparky It was!🤓
Me too. That was one of my favorite gifts of all time. It was a Radio Shack kit.
I think you have produced the simplest and clearest explanation of the progression of electronic devices I have seen and would be recommended to view by anyone learning electronics, well done.
A couple of key discoveries and inventions in the early days of the MOSFET were 1) the process recipe for growing gate oxide (SiO2) on silicon with low Si/SiO2 interface defect densities. 2) The self-aligned gate where the gate electrode was deposited before source/drain diffusion (or ion implant) and was used as a mask. The gate had to be able to withstand a very high temperature dopant activation anneal so had to be refractive like TiSi, not aluminum. Without those innovations, MOSFETs would just be laboratory curiosities.
They had to figure out materials that not only had the desired electrical properties, but also could be cheaply added as layers and subjected to the harsh conditions during chip construction.
Thanks for sharing. Progress in the electronics industry is mind blowing. I studied electronics at diploma level in the 80s and 90s. What I learned then is still relevant in how digital logic is applied in the design of electronic circuits, but the process of miniaturization to the tiny scale devices we have now is truly incredible.
Unbelievably interesting topic. Congrats on 1 million!
1 million? meh, I got more MOSFET's in my washing machine!
What an excellent choice of subject.
I loved how in depth you went with this subject. Hope maybe you can eventually make videos about different cpu architectures.
A little history I learned while doing a school report: Schockly's original design worked fine - right up until the moment when AT&T attorneys did a standard patent search. Imagine their surprise when they found that his idea had been patented ten years earlier, by a college professor. They had no choice but to hand-build the early point-contact transistors to fulfil contracts.
Who was the College Professor ?
@@GodzillaGoesGaga Can't remember the name, but it was Polish and he got the patent in '38. It was 20 years ago that I went BACK to school :) but I'm pretty sure the book I got that from was called "Crystal Fire".
You cannot patent an idea. Only inventions can receive patents. A thoughtful person would realize the silliness of the idea patenting of ideas. The patent office would be totally overwhelmed with ideas people wanted patented. The silly story of some unknown professor and his "patented idea" is simply another leftist attempt to discredit Shockley. Hey! I need to get that idea patented.
@@billythomas8749 A worked-out, proven idea can be patented and this is a verified story, you goof. I worked for AT&T. The point-contact transistor was used for early production because they couldn't get the patent worked out for the superior Shockley design.
@user-bk3ep9lk7v Interesting guy, but he invented the MOS, not the BJT.
I absolutely loved this video. Your ability to breakdown the information and present it in a clear way, is exceptional. Many thanks!
I can’t tell you how many 741 op amps I have used in my life. That really brought back memories!
Isn't it kind of insane that we've developed one specific piece of tech so hardcore that literally they only thing that will stop us is the physical size of the building blocks of material we use to build it. Like that's just insane to me
I have a feeling we'll end up going beyond the atom and using fundamental particles as transistors
Going to the moon was a walk in the park compared to the epic journey made by the semicon industry. And it ain't finished yet!
@@vibaj16 I mean maybe, but I feel that would be decades of scientific advancement. Likely not something we'll see in our lifetime
@@Buffalo_Soldier is it possible in our lifetime? Maybe. It's just that I've noticed physics tends to get, funnkkaaayy, when you get extremely small. To go smaller than an atom for transistors would require a few leaps in innovation rather then steady improvement. Perhaps we'll get lucky and someone will discover such an innovation tho.
@SOUL SEEKER We haven't really advanced mainstream operating systems since the 1970s. They're all still fundamentally based on timeshare OSes designed to protect the computer from the user. And programming languages haven't really advanced since the 1980s invented OOP. It *looks* more cool, but there's a reason Windows 11 still runs Windows 3 software without change.
wow that was great. when i left the military in the late '80s i got a job at a semiconductor plant. it was hard to explain to people how a chip was actually made. you had to see it to appreciate it. the multiple layers stacked on top of it each other in a scale we couldn't even see with our naked eyes. anyway thanks for this.
electronics is such that it cannot be seen with eyes, cannot be heard with ears and cannot be sensed with touch, smell, etc, etc unlike mechanical, etc, hence it is impossible to know, consider the failure of electronics before, prior they fail unlike the easy mechanical, etc, etc stuff
A fantastic Video! I have to say you (and your team?) are an excellent communicator. I am an engineer in business development and as such I have to convey technical subjects to non technical people - on a daily basis. I am in awe of what you are able to do with a 15 minute video here!
I really liked this explanation and history of the FET. Very well done and informative. I even liked the fact that it was included that it was a "mistake" discovery, as a lot of documentaries/articles fail to mention this tidbit of information. Just goes to show that there really isn't a "failure", but just another way it can't be done and to keep on trucking, as it may happen that you find the answer(s) to questions you didn't know.
Your still Boss! This is one on my favorite videos so far or yours ... killar man! Keep up the good work.
You're... Sorry, had to. 😇
@@daghtus I hate it when sometimes my phone's spellchecker changes words like that to what they aren't supposed to be. It drives me nuts. 😉😛
@@daghtus Maybe he made Curious a distiller, and was presenting it to him. "Here is the still I made for you, boss!"
@@CybershamanX agreed, predictive text makes us look stupid sometimes lol
@@daghtus 😊
7nm transistors are not actually 7nm across - the number of the transistor size stopped meaning anything physical around 14nm. There's a lot more to each process node than just the length of each transistor. Source: I work at one of the companies mentioned in the video - I see images of (and measure) them on a daily basis.
It's supposed to be the feature size though what manufacturers call a feature is not consistent so never compare for example Intel's 7nm to somebody else's
I thought that the last time the process name and physical reality matched up was at 22nm.
@@korakys That could be the case - I don't remember exactly, and being sort of half in production and half in research, we deal with many process nodes all at once, so it makes it harder to keep track. Right now for instance, we work on at least 4 process nodes at once - everything from high volume production to 2 or 3 nodes in the future that are under development. Honestly the internal code names mean more to me than the #nm names do.
@@gorak9000 So we basically entered the quantum world allready?
I would like to have someone make a video that explains what these **nm indication means now...in layman's terms.
One of a few channels on RUclips, I always press like before the video starts. As always, great video.
You´re not alone!
Ditto.
The best documentary channel on the YT. Watching these alone makes up for paying your internet bill. This is also the closest I get in terms of overall presentation and vibes to the old pre-reality bs Discovery Channel. Many thanks for the educational videos, love them!
I hardly understood anything you talked about but, I really enjoyed learning just how limited I am. I'm 73 and remember getting my first GE transistor radio and strapping it to my bicycle to listen to KILT radio in Houston, TX. Rock and Roll on the bicycle was my salvation in my little town of La Marque, TX. south of Houston.
I’m 55 and have no idea what he’s talking about but I do find it interesting. I’m an old school mechanical guy, so I’ll build the physical hardware and let the young people bring it to life with their computers and electronics. Greetings from Michigan!
wonderful episode! 👏
Hi marsgizmo
"Moore's law might have a bit more life in it than we thought" said nerds for the last 40 years.
Mama says that alligators are ornery because they got all them teeth and no toothbrush
* have nerds been saying
@@paddor *no
We created skynet lol
@ No; quantum physics will kick Moore's ass presently.
I've always wondered how it's done. They're impossibly small, it hurts my simpletons brain trying to imagine the production process. Great video.
Well, our DNA molecules are even much smaller, so there is still huge room for improvements.
@es pretty sureDNA molecules are bigger than transistors? They consost of at least hundreds of atoms while a transistor is like less than 30 in diameter or so?
@@johnuferbach9166 i didn't mean 'physically' smaller.
DNA macromolecules consist of millions of atoms, and are very large compared to many others, or to those transistors.
The principal difference is, that _every_ atom or aminoacidic group there performs a certain function.
And our semiconductor technology is still quite far from this fine level.
Man this video was so cool. I had to pause it and dive through wikipedia and articles for almost everything you talked about, so much it was fascinating. Tnaks!
Beautifully crafted mini-lecture Sir. The most accurate and compact historical brief of the transistor I have yet seen.
The MOSFET was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. It was a breakthrough in power electronics. Generations of MOSFETs enabled power designers to achieve performance and density levels not possible with bipolar transistors.
Thank you for making this video.
I became an electronics technician years ago and this stuff blew my mind.
It’s truly remarkable how far we have come so fast.
We’re not done yet.
Never finished , Ask Elon !🙃
"Tesla was totally forgotten by history!"
-The Internet
Yeah, can you name any of the people who developed the integrated circuit?
that is really quite true and quite amamzing. thanks for sharing
That's because Tesla holds the patent for that.
Yes, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments invented the Integrated Circuit and Robert Noyce of Intel made it practical using the Planer Transistor he previously invented. They share the patent for the integrated circuit.
@@skeletoncrew539 I made them by HAND working for a company called "Hybridine" in Irvine......in 1972!. Microscopes that did soldering jump wires, and algebraic formula's for testing . Remembered that equation I used for years afterward!
@@Dwightstjohn-fo8ki If we taught this in school today we might have more understanding (and appreciation) for the gadgets that we simply cannot "Live without". After training in electronics at a young age I was stunned to realize that the vast majority of people didn't know how a television worked, yet spent most of their spare time sitting in front of one.
This by far is the most fascinating video I’ve watched on this channel since (as the author states) mosfet affects every aspects of our modern lives. Thanks for this video. Enjoyed it immensely.
A very informative video! One note/nit -- the slide you use at 13:52 isn't about microprocessor or MOSFET photolithography, but instead about how microfluidic devices are made. And don't get me wrong, microfluidics are super-cool -- but they handle liquid instead of electrons (;
Yeah, very nice slide but not really about MOSFET but rather lab-on-a -chip thingies. Out of curiosity I paused the video and looked at it closer. I came to the same conclusion and then I started ploughing through the comments to see if I was the only one that noticed. Still a great video of course.
Nice presentation , I'm in my mid 60's now so growing up in the 60's and having a father that was an electronic engineer I got to watch the evolution of electronics fairly closely and it has been pretty amazing how far things have come in my lifetime . One thing I remember hearing on a few occasions is "we have hit the limit of physics" on things like layer thickness and others but layer thickness is the one that I find the most funny because the claimed limit keeps changing . They really should just say it's the limit of current technology rather than claim it's a limit of physics , luckily not everyone believes in limits and they seek to break those supposed limits . From what I hear bacteria is being used to etch the smallest of layers which seems interesting , I would love to see that demonstrated .
The next step I think will be 3D printing circuits and insulators to reduce distance traveled internally for operations and get layer thickness down even more , an entire computer could theoretically be printed into a single chip in almost any shape you wanted and would only require limited external connections .
Bacteria are orders of magnitude larger than the smallest layers so...
In regards to the limits, yeah physics does throw curveballs when you get into the single digit nanometer scale. As in quantam tunnelling of electrons and such, high energy photons from general background radiation flipping mosfets, which is why clever error correcting code is needed. And now clever architectures to further increase the performance of modern chip designs. These days the whole 5...4...3 nm nomenclature is just marketing jargon, to indicate progress in computing power, not the actual size of the circuits that are being made. As it stands, the chips are already printed in 3D, just go take a look at how RAM and SSD's work.
This is a fantastic overview on the subject. All my favorite things in one video. Watching this was a nice break from cutting open old mental can ICs, and de-capsulating old epoxy ones which I normally do to gather a similar understanding. This technology is mind-blindingly awesome.
This was a top shelf video, loved it.
You will have to do one on the op-amp an amazing building block used in many circuit's.
Mind boggling on every level...I'm not talking about Paul's shirt.
What a wonderful channel you produce. I remember as a teenager in the late 1980s getting my first real, legit hifi stereo amp it’s was a MOSFET amp and I had no idea what that meant but the technician was incredulous a teenager like me was getting a mosfet amp and I think he was actually jealous. I still use that amp today over 3o years later it’s never failed and sounds incredible I’ve even used and sold Macintosh amps that didn’t sound nearly as good. MOSFET was and is real! Thanks for the elucidation finally
I know it might sound silly but you was the first person to didactly and explicitly tell me the basic difference among bipolar transistor (works based upon current level applyed to base) and FET transistor (works based upon gate voltage level). So obvious and you did open my eyes ... after years working with electronics. Thank You! Thanks Nord VPN for sponsoring this channel!
6:00 even cpus had wood grain back then
Congrats on your 1.01 million viewers. You've done an admirable job getting there and looking forward to watching you get to your 10 millionth viewer! Edit, 10 millionth subscriber! Thanks for the heads up TTG!
Subscribers? But yeah, same!
I can look in literally any direction sitting in my home and I would have trouble to NOT find something that has some sort of transistor in it now. "But what about straight up to the ceiling?" Yep, LED lightbulb, has a microchip in it. MOSFETs truly have changed EVERYTHING.
What about your toilet?
@snodgrass snod Those AI doo-doos are what become sentient, create Skynet and destroy humanity... They have the most to resent about us!
For that matter, the LED itself is 2/3 of a transistor.
@@johnbergstrom2931 If he's from Japan it has chips in it!
@@3DPDKi mean an led is a pn junction, akin to npn in a bjt, a mosfet is more akin to a capacitor
I completely nerded out. The end with the uv light integrated machine was fantastic. Nice amount of
information with this video for its length.
that was.. mindblowing. the fact that modern Tech is able to put billions of Transistors into such a device is just insane.
great video.
keep going! greetings from Germany✌🏼
Takes me back to my 1970s to early Air Force days in PMEL calibrating and repairing test equipment. Back in the days of vacuum tubes, hybrid circuits using both transistors and tubes or as our British friends call valves.
Ken Schaefer : I had a chance to go into PMEL in 1982,but chose instead to go into F-15 avionics.
I think I would've gotten more out of being in PMEL than F-15 Avionics.
But then again,who really does component level repairs these days?
Did they teach you how to do circuit board repairs without schematics?
@@ebayerr Some of the equipment didn't even have Technical Orders so we had to use manufacturers manuals about 25% of the time. And those often had block diagrams and often no schematics. Yeah we had to identify circuitry at times by taking measurements. I taught PMEL for 5 years. When I started school in PMEL we didn't have calculators and worked with numbers with up to 6 or 7 decimal places. Used a lot of logarithms for calculations as slide rules were not near accurate enough.
@@kenschaefer7625: Very cool Ken.
As it turned out,I had gotten stationed at Kadena AB,Okinawa and that little island was an audiophile's dream come true.
And having your kind of skills would've been nice to know.
Check out the video I posted from Kadena in 1986.The base commander gave permission for some airmen I knew to put on a little concert on base.
A great piece, with the extra length reflecting a more in-depth discussion than you usually do. One minor point: around 4:30 you articulately discuss the difference between a transistor and FET, viz the transistor is modulated by base current whilst FETs are modulated by gate voltage. Moving to 6:50 you state that a valve (tube) is similar to a transistor. Er I’d think it’s more correct to say a valve is similar to a FET. Reason being is that each is modulated by applied voltage, whilst the transistor (junction transistor) is modulated by current.
Though I realise that this would complicate the flow of the story…
Ah okay this video is about audio. I was hoping for some nice, new visuals. Anyway, the difference between a tube and a FET seems to be the doping which can compensate the space charge. With a FET you can define a working point so to say by doping. Without a field there will be an equal density of electrons. With a tube electrons repel each other an like to slam in the metal electrodes. Around this working point we can enhance the flow by making the gate positive ( NPN transistor ) or make the gate negative to deplete. The effect is more pronounced on the semiconductor-insulator bandgap step then in the middle. This limits the gate width similar to the grid pitch in a tube.
I like Paul trap or electron lenses which by alternating fields create an effective confining field an work like doping in a tube. But for some reason this is only used in CRT -- where you don't switch on and off, but left and right.
A FET is a Field Effect *Transistor* ! Are you trying differentiate between bipolar transistors, FET's and the various MOSFET's? (enhanced, depletion, n-channel, p-channel, J-FET's, etc) and other transistors?
I had an EE lab or two measuring the properties of several FET's.Unfortunately, My lab partner and I mixed up a regular FET with a J-FET.and screwed up the lab.
Otherwise you have some good points. A bipolar transistor is a current amplifier. Tubes and FET's are voltage amplifiers.
@@nineball039 I try to unify transistors. I think the only difference between J-FET and MOSFET is the allowed voltages on the gate. With non finFET MOSFETs the substrate acts like a J-FET. To me it looks like J-FETs can achieve wide channels, but on the other hand the depletion region seems to be wider than the SO2 layer width in a MOSFET and thus signal voltages probably need to be larger. I don't understand why GaAs J-FETs for digital circuits can be fast.
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt What's the difference between a J-FET and a 'regular' FET? (Measuring the parameters of both was a main part of our EE lab in the late 1970's).
@@nineball039 MOSFET has an insulator to insulate the gate. Only Silicon can form a defect free Si -- SiO2 interface. And even without defects there can be interface states which are also not so many on that chemical. With GaAs you cannot do it, so you insulate Gate and channel by means of intrinsic GaAs and a the depletion zone of a diode. Ah, I love nip diodes .. sorry. So there can be no enhancement mode JFET .. you would loose the depletion zone.
I vaguely remember my family had a valve TV when i was a kid. When they broke we used the valves as Flash Gordon Rockets
Although the TV replaced the radio for most people, I stuck with our radio. It had six, maybe seven, tubes and was a floor model, with a 10 " electrodynamic speaker. Radio was still strong in 1950 with lots of great programs.
Don't know why I didn't find you earlier but it was well worth the wait. Thanks so much! :)
Lovely video! You should consider doing a lot more of these. Digging down in the 'small' yet amazing inventions of the 20th Century, that truly changed our life.
You’re so damn good at picking interesting topics. Wonderful job as always!
Wow, what an exceptionally interesting video. I knew quite a lot about transistors but didn't know too much about their history and how they are made. This was very informative 👍
Absolutely brilliant. You have explained this complex information in a really understandable way. Excellent work. Thank you.
If anyone is interested in video games, this is the point of historical departure in the game series Fallout. They never invented the transistor, and despite reaching 2077 before nuclear annihilation (after which the games take place) everything remains valve-based. So massive TVs and radios, dot-matrix computer terminals etc. The 1950s aesthetic and Red Scare is also a big trope in the game so it's certainly an aesthetic choice too, but I've always found it an interesting thing to ponder. It certainly is the most impactful invention of the 20th century!
Mr Droid all you videos are some of the best anywhere on the web.
I especially love you Project Apollo series, again they are so good to watch, and agree Landing man on the moon was the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th Century.
Excellent video! I have been a fan of home computing since I saw my first one in 1982 and it boggles my mind how memory and processing power has gotten smaller, cheaper, faster and cooler.
FET transistors are my favorite transistors. IGBTs are second (it’s a FET and BJT transistor combination).
That's cheating since an IGBT is a FET + a Bipolar Transistors. 😀
Even better than transistors? Memristors
@@eldencw Yes, but it’s not actually an equivalent circuit. You can’t easily just substitute an IGBT with a bipolar and FET. The operation is unique. Equivalent circuits used in documentation are for conceptual understanding of the operation, not true operation.
BJT are faster...
Mel b is my favourite spice girl
The *SMALL SIZES* involved in the _bits and bobs_ of these components really is phenomenal.
This is great information. I love how you put it all together. I know making a youtube video like this takes a lot of work. Great Job!
I play my electric guitar through a fuzz pedal with three germanium transistors. Then it goes through a MOFET overdrive pedal and then into high tech microprocessor controlled digital reverb and delay with premium FET buffers and preamp, all before it gets to my 50 watt stereo vacuum tube head. Musicians made all these technical devices into musical instruments that are still used and loved today for their sound, warts and all. Meanwhile the digital industry attempts to reproduce those old sounds, from crusty old tape echo machines to tube distortion and dynamic effects. The tube industry nearly died if not for the venerable tube amp and pedal Guru Mike Mathews of EHX. The guitar pedal industries managed to get obsolete analog Bucket Brigade chips made again, just so they could make the classic Analog Delay pedals again. The history of these devises is fascinating to me being a techie and a musician. Bravo for good story telling. I'll subscribe.
Just a FYI: the flow chart at 14:00 is describing the manufacture of non-electric microfluidic devices, as used in fuel cells, microbiology etc. It still illustrates the idea of photolithography, but it's not describing the process of making ICs like MOSFETs.
please QD, make a video on chip manufacture
We seem to progress in oddly staggered ways. In some ways, we’re still closer to cavemen, but in others, we might as well be super advanced aliens on Star Trek!
It all depends on what you prioritize as a society.
Its almost like we reverse engineered a specific technology and made a primitive recreation
Our civilization produces increasingly smarter individuals at its margins thanks to the work of each previous generation but the vast majority doesn't learn nor progresses.
@@tyronelannister9922 Are you referring to Roswell...
At 14:05 the figure is not about the process of creating MOSFETs but instead microfluidic chips
though the principle is the same: su8 on a silicon wafer. you can then do other coatings or sacrificial layers.
What an awesome video. Excellent coverage of the entire lifespan of transistors. Transistor switching with a single atom.....that's insane.
Took a photo of the proximity fuse on display in the Udvar-Hazy center yesterday with a newfound appreciation! Thanks!
At 14:07, the diagram doesn't show how transistors are made, but rather how to make microfluidic devices, using silicon molds.
Yeah especially the last image with some hoses attached to the completed device is quite an obvious sign that we're not dealing with semiconductor manufacturing.
That was great education, thank you!
The Zip was pretty special..
I learned all this many years ago and it's fantastic to watch it again in such a really informative and well presented way.
Thank you.
What a great video. It's informative, comprehensive, and easy to understand, not to mention a great trip down memory lane. Well done!
The sheer AMOUNT of Knowledge that you can pack into 17 mins is ASTOUNDING! .... Curious Droid NEVER disappoints. .... Thank You.
You know, that 7nm TSMC process...nothing in the transistor is actually 7nm in size. At this point, it's basically all marketing speak, and has no actual connection to anything in silicon. AFAIK, the last time the node size was the actual "feature" size was at 22nm.
Very good overview and review. But I think the Colossus was actually built outside of BP although it was delivered to BP because it was to be deployed there. And I think there were two distinct Colossus machines: one was pretty fixed-purpose, but the second was truly an advance and deserves its place as a first in computer history. Well done, UK! ☺️
I didn't know I needed this RUclips channel in my life, it got suggested, I clicked to see what content you had and now I comment and subscribe, good work team
My father had (and maybe still has) a transistor radio much like the ones you showed, maybe even that same brand. He had a leather case to go with it. When I was a very young kid in the 70s, he used to brag about it to me all the time, though at the time I couldn't quite see what was so great about it.
Chips were improving so fast in the 80's and 90's that it was often said a product was obsolete by the time you could buy it.
It still is tbh on some products like smartphones and graphics cards.
Dennard's scaling hadn't ended back then, so you'd see chips double in clockspeed in just a couple years. going from 8mhz to 15mhz to 33mhz to 66mhz. Nowdays chips have hit that tdp limit and IBM, AMD, and Intel haven't been able to break past ~5ghz (IBM still makes chips though they are for the mainframe market)
10:08 no one ever gives credit to Jack Kilby for the creation of the integrated circuit. He got a nobel prize for it.
Somebody gave him credit: The Nobel Committee gave him credit. That's what the Nobel Prize is about.
Lots of people don’t like given William Shockley and Jack Kilby credit.
Yes he did!!! Thank You Jack Kilby....
Asome video! Thanks! 😃
Interesting, in the Dutch news ASML is always mentioned as a chip-manufacturer, but actually they make the machines which can produce chips. Now I know! 😉
No it is just one of the many machines that are used in the process.
@@fladder64 The most important machine by a huge margin.
@@krashd No every step in the making is important, but for most processes the newest ASML tool is not needed an older version will work just as good.
The MOSFET was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. It was a breakthrough in power electronics. Generations of MOSFETs enabled power designers to achieve performance and density levels not possible with bipolar transistors.
Mind-blowingly concise, accurate and contextual.
1:02 I feel it's worth mentioning that all of those "512gb" microSD cards you showed were fake/counterfeit cards. A proper one will cost around $50 at the least.
Fake microSD cards are a huge problem
This. If I could get a real one for $30 I'd be laughing like a fat spider.
The moment i heard what he said, i lost hope in the faith of the video...
You can put the whole 512GB in, the problem is taking them out 😬
The only thing, I can count on in my life, which is always constant are the fantastic shirts. ♥️
Back in HS we were discussing the "Greatest Inventions" it was agreed to be Soap.
but soap wasn´t invented in the 20th century ^^
@@maxmustermann76 True, but if you were to take out soap today, it would have bigger consequences than your phone not waking you up. 😁
There's also indoor plumbing. Also not a 20th century invention but it may have had a larger impact on standards of living than any other single thing!
I’ve always thought it was dwarf wheat, since it tripled the carrying capacity of farmland.
@@gyozakeynsianism A guaranteed supply of clean water is probably the biggest boon to mankind. Followed up by sewerage then medicine.
That is a fascinating history of the development and use of solid-state devices.
I remember how thrilled I was in the early 60s to have my pocket 9V AM radio with its 8 or 9 transistors and a jack for an earphone, so I could listen to Top 40 AM rock radio around the time of the British invasion(1964 - 1967). Later I marveled at the use of MOSFET front-end voltmeters that had the high input impedance necessary for making voltage measurements in RF circuits, where no loading of the circuit was necessary. Previously, we had to use vacuum tube voltmeters(VTVMs) for that purpose and they were often barely stable enough to get good measurements.
Great explanation all the way through! I wish your programs were broadcasted by public TV channels or Netflix for example.
"The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli."
I can safely say I'm more confused now and thoroughly convinced it's just magic.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"
- Arthur C. Clarke
@@dzejrid And is that not where we are today and have been for a while? I think only a small fraction of a percent of humans - and that is probably putting it generously - really understand to the basic core how for instance a modern smartphone really works. We all use them, but practically noone, my self included, really know how they work. We just put the tip of a finger on a glass plate on one side of the smartphone, and actual magic happens. It does what we think it should do, like waving a magic stick. Even without having to say any magic words.
@@brianjuelpedersen6389 It's all in the wrist.
@@brianjuelpedersen6389 It doesn't have to be this way. With sufficient effort and learning I think everyone can get it.
@@RobinTheBot I disagree. Unless you're born with a brain wired for engineering, you're not going to 'get it' (unless you happen to live many lifetimes - and by then the pace of technology would outrun your non-engineering brain).
I enjoyed this very much, Paul, thank you. I was a computer/engineering systems technician for many years. Most of my bosses hadn't a clue, and if they did, they'd lose it.
Came for your amazing shirt... stayed for the mind blowing science and technology :) thank you! Love the shirt and excellent content!
another piece of art of research and storytelling working in balance... thank you for this video!