Electronic "brains" approaching the human brain in scope and reliability came much closer to reality today with the announcement by Texas Instruments Incorporated of the first commercial production of silicon transistors kernel-sized substitutes for vacuum tubes. By using silicon instead of germanium, the initial commercial silicon transistor immediately raises power outputs and double operating temperatures!
The potential application of this entirely new transistor is so great that America's major electronics firms have been conducting silicon experiments for some time.Texas Instruments -- a leading germanium transistor manufacturer -- is the first to succeed in placing the new silicon transistor into commercial availability of the revolutionary new high power and practically heat-independent transistor was announced today by Texas Instruments simultaneously at its main plant here and at an Institute of Radio Engineers meeting in Dayton, Ohio.
Instead of the vacuum tube's complex, bulky, fragile construction, transistors use a flea-sized piece of solid semiconductor (neither conductor nor insulator)material to amplify, control, and switch electrical impulses. Transistors are truly a "flea-power" device, 100,000 of them consuming no more power than one ordinary vacuum tube.
Texas Instruments and many other leading electronics firms for several years have been manufacturing the tiny transistors make from germanium.Germanium, a rare and expensive but more easily worked material, has the disadvantage of low power output and great performance variation with temperature change.
The new silicon transistor operates with little change at over 300 degrees Fahrenheit, almost 100 degrees above boiling water. Transistors now can be used in the most complicated and complex electronic equipments, where the heat generated by other components has formerly limited the use of germanium transistors.
Today's huge electronic "brains" now occupy whole rooms, consume great amounts of electricity, and require large cooling systems because of the heat generated by their thousands of vacuum tubes. By using silicon transistors,electronic "brains" can be shrunk to a manageable size, requiring much less power, and having increased reliability.
The electronic "brains" in today's supersonic military planes and missiles control almost all functions and account for much valuable space and weight. Not only will silicon transistor make the equipment more reliable and save much space and weight by miniaturizing the electrical amplifying and controlling elements, but much associated equipment also can be made smaller because of lower power demand.
Even with currently-used germanium's handicaps, the substitution of transistors for vacuum tubes has been making great headway because of the transistor's advantage in size, power consumption, and reliability. Hearing aids have so far been the largest single user, with the combination of a wide range of simpler commercial and military applications coming close behind. Transistors already have made wristwatch and pocket radios commonplace among engineers.
The silicon transistor is a direct outgrowth of the work of the Texas Instruments Material and Components Research Section, headed by Dr. Gordon K. Teal,assistant vice president. Dr. Teal today presented a scientific paper describing the first production model silicon transistor before the National Conference on Airborne Electronics of the I. R. E. in Dayton, Ohio.
Silicon -- next to oxygen the earth's most common element -- long has been known by scientists to possess superior temperature stability and power handling characteristics. But up until now, the difficulties of purifying, 'growing" a single crystal, and fabricating silicon transistors have kept them laboratory devices,unreproducible on a production-line basis.
The manufacture of a transistor is a marvel of modern science, with laboratory techniques put on a production-line basis. The semiconductor material first must be purified to the purest substance known to man...with less than one part impurity in one billion!
Then a single large perfect crystal must be "grown" at high temperature in an inert atmosphere with a "seed" crystal continually being rotated and "pulled"from the molten purified semiconductor material. And as if that were not difficult enough, the electrical characteristics of the crystal must be charged during"growing" so that the single crystal will have portions with dissimilar current-carrying characteristics.
Two months ago, Texas Instruments began production of a simple single crystal silicon semiconductor device -- a silicon alloyed junction diode use for signal rectification -- experience with which led to placing the silicon triode transistor into production. The new silicon transistors are already in small, but growing volume production and units are immediately available on a limited quantity basis to insure widest possible distribution.