TRANSISTER

DO U KNOW IT?




Transistor was invented by - J.Bardeen,W.Shockley and W.Brattain.

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical power. It is composed of semiconductor material with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be higher than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Today, some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.

The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and is ubiquitous in modern electronic systems. Following its development in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios,calculators, and computers, among other things. The transistor is on the list of IEEE milestones in electronics, and the inventors were jointly awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.

Importance

Although several companies each produce over a billion individually packaged (known as discrete) transistors every year, the vast majority of transistors are now produced in integrated circuits (often shortened to IC, microchips or simply chips), along with diodes, resistors, capacitors and other electronic components, to produce complete electronic circuits. A logic gate consists of up to about twenty transistors whereas an advanced microprocessor, as of 2009, can use as many as 3 billion transistors (MOSFETs). "About 60 million transistors were built in 2002 ... for [each] man, woman, and child on Earth." The transistor is the key active component in practically all modern electronics. Many consider it to be one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. Its importance in today's society rests on its ability to be mass-produced using a highly automated process (semiconductor device fabrication) that achieves astonishingly low per-transistor costs. The invention of the first transistor at Bell Labs was named an IEEE Milestone in 2009.

The transistor's low cost, flexibility, and reliability have made it a ubiquitous device. Transistorized mechatronic circuits have replaced electromechanical devices in controlling appliances and machinery. It is often easier and cheaper to use a standard microcontroller and write a computer program to carry out a control function than to design an equivalent mechanical control function.

Simplified operation

There are two types of transistors, which have slight differences in how they are used in a circuit. A bipolar transistor has terminals labeled base,collector, and emitter. A small current at the base terminal (that is, flowing between the base and the emitter) can control or switch a much larger current between the collector and emitter terminals. For a field-effect transistor, the terminals are labeled gate, source, and drain, and a voltage at the gate can control a current between source and drain.The essential usefulness of a transistor comes from its ability to use a small signal applied between one pair of its terminals to control a much larger signal at another pair of terminals. This property is called gain. A transistor can control its output in proportion to the input signal; that is, it can act as an amplifier. Alternatively, the transistor can be used to turn current on or off in a circuit as an electrically controlled switch, where the amount of current is determined by other circuit elements. The image to the right represents a typical bipolar transistor in a circuit. Charge will flow between emitter and collector terminals depending on the current in the base. Because internally the base and emitter connections behave like a semiconductor diode, a voltage drop develops between base and emitter while the base current exists. The amount of this voltage depends on the material the transistor is made from, and is referred to as VBE.

Transistor as a switch

Transistors are commonly used as electronic switches, both for high-power applications such as switched-mode power supplies and for low-power applications such as logic gates.

In a grounded-emitter transistor circuit, such as the light-switch circuit shown, as the base voltage rises, the emitter and collector currents rise exponentially. The collector voltage drops because of reduced resistance from collector to emitter. If the voltage difference between the collector and emitter were zero (or near zero), the collector current would be limited only by the load resistance (light bulb) and the supply voltage. This is called saturation because current is flowing from collector to emitter freely. When saturated, the switch is said to be on.

Providing sufficient base drive current is a key problem in the use of bipolar transistors as switches. The transistor provides current gain, allowing a relatively large current in the collector to be switched by a much smaller current into the base terminal. The ratio of these currents varies depending on the type of transistor, and even for a particular type, varies depending on the collector current. In the example light-switch circuit shown, the resistor is chosen to provide enough base current to ensure the transistor will be saturated.

In any switching circuit, values of input voltage would be chosen such that the output is either completely off, or completely on. The transistor is acting as a switch, and this type of operation is common in digital circuits where only "on" and "off" values are relevant.

Transistor as an amplifier

The common-emitter amplifier is designed so that a small change in voltage (V_in) changes the small current through the base of the transistor; the transistor's current amplification combined with the properties of the circuit mean that small swings in V_in produce large changes in V_out.

Various configurations of single transistor amplifier are possible, with some providing current gain, some voltage gain, and some both.

From mobile phones to televisions, vast numbers of products include amplifiers for sound reproduction, radio transmission, and signal processing. The first discrete-transistor audio amplifiers barely supplied a few hundred milliwatts, but power and audio fidelity gradually increased as better transistors became available and amplifier architecture evolved.

Modern transistor audio amplifiers of up to a few hundred watts are common and relatively inexpensive.

Types

	PNP		P-channel
	NPN		N-channel
BJT		JFET

BJT and JFET symbols

				P-channel
				N-channel
JFET	MOSFET enh		MOSFET dep

JFET and IGFET symbols

Transistors are categorized by

• Semiconductor material (date first used): the metalloids germanium (1947) and silicon (1954)— in amorphous, polycrystalline and monocrystalline form; the compounds gallium arsenide (1966) and silicon carbide (1997), the alloy silicon-germanium (1989), the allotrope of carbon graphene (research ongoing since 2004), etc.—see Semiconductor material
• Structure: BJT, JFET, IGFET (MOSFET), insulated-gate bipolar transistor, "other types"
• Electrical polarity (positive and negative): n–p–n, p–n–p (BJTs); n-channel, p-channel (FETs)
• Maximum power rating: low, medium, high
• Maximum operating frequency: low, medium, high, radio (RF), microwave frequency (the maximum effective frequency of a transistor is denoted by the term , an abbreviation for transition frequency—the frequency of transition is the frequency at which the transistor yields unity gain)
• Application: switch, general purpose, audio, high voltage, super-beta, matched pair
• Physical packaging: through-hole metal, through-hole plastic, surface mount, ball grid array, power modules—see Packaging
• Amplification factor h_fe, β_F (transistor beta) or g_m (transconductance).

Thus, a particular transistor may be described as silicon, surface-mount, BJT, n–p–n, low-power, high-frequency switch.