MOSFET – The Most significant invention of the 20th Century

what makes a truly world-changing invention there are many contenders for the most significant invention of the 20th century the jet engine the airplane television the internet the computer and antibiotics are all worthy contenders but unless you live like a 15th century hermit or as part of an undiscovered tribe there is one which touches the lives of almost everyone on the planet on a daily basis though few have seen them directly they are now the most widely manufactured device in history in 1954 the world's first transistor radio the regency tr1 used four texas instruments npn transistors and cost 49.95 equivalent to about 507 dollars in 2021. today a 512 gigabyte sd card can contain over a trillion transistors and costs about thirty dollars as of 2018 an estimated 13 sextillion that's 13 billion trillion of them have been made since 1960 a number that now grows by thousands of trillions every day and at an increasing rate nothing else made by humans comes even close to the rate of change that the transistor has gone through in just over 60 years and enabled other world-changing technologies and discoveries well beyond the world of electronics this is the story of the metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor or mosfet and how it changed the world and where it might go in the future [Music] [Applause] [Music] this video is sponsored by nordvpn now if you're interested in keeping a low profile out there on the internet keeping prying eyes from trying to gain access to your computer and the important information that it may be holding it's important that you keep it safe and one of the best ways is to use a vpn like nordvpn which is what i use using a vpn hides your computer's real ip address and makes it more difficult for hackers to gain access to your computer but it's not all about logging into your bank account the number of times i get blocked from us websites when i'm researching for videos because they detect i'm from europe and even though we in the uk are no longer in the eu now but with nord i can just reappear as if i'm somewhere in the u.s or canada and i can continue with my work nordvpn also uses nordlink's technology which is built around the wire guard protocol and is even faster than before and outperforms any other mainstream vpn protocol with users experiencing up to two times increase in download and upload speed with nord links you can get this with 73 plus four months free by using the link at the top of the description below and there's even a 30-day money-back guarantee so there's no excuse for not giving it a try it could be said that the start of the modern world as we know it began on december 23 1947 when the first pnp point contact germanium transistor was demonstrated to the management of bell labs and whilst that might be technically correct one type of transistor the mosfet would enable the large-scale integrated circuits that will become the building blocks of devices that now power the modern world and the device that you're now watching and this didn't arrive until nearly a decade later in 1960 now i know that there might be quite a few people out there thinking yeah i've heard of transistors but what are they and what do they do well a transistor is a basic electronic component and is mostly used in one of two ways one as an amplifier and the other as an electronic switch now this may seem like two very different functions for the same device but they are really the same and it just depends on how it's used in a circuit there are many different types of transistors but they all have three connections called emitter base collector for bipolar junction transistors and drain gate and source for field effect transistors or fets for bipolar junction transistors the amount of current fed into the base controls the current flowing between the collector and the emitter and in fact the amount of voltage applied to the gate controls the amount of current flowing between the drain and the source in general applying a carefully controlled amount of current or voltage depending upon what type of transistor is it can work as an amplifier but apply a large current or voltage and it will saturate and switch on fully remove that current or voltage it will then switch off fully so now it's working as an electronic switch when used in a computer this switching on and off represents the logical ones and zeros in binary code which is the basic element of all computer programs and in today's computer cpus they can switch on and off billions of times a second now today whilst we can see the usefulness of having billions of transistors all working together in modern cpus and memory there was a time not long after the transistor had been developed but even the people who made them couldn't see the point of having so many together in one place after the first ic to have 10 000 transistors was developed in 1973 one of the executives of a chipmaker was reported to have said why would anyone need 10 000 transistors on one chip one of the first uses for such ics was in pocket calculators in the early micro processors and memory chips the first commercially produced microprocessor was the intel 404 a 4-bit cpu in 1971 which contained 2 500 transistors compare that to today's apple a15 cpu which powers the iphone 13 that has 15 billion transistors the development of a transistor was a reaction to the thermionic valve or vacuum tube which had been developed in 1907 and had ushered in the first electronic revolution enabling radio tv radar and eventually the first fully electronic computers although valves were a completely different design the triode valve was the equivalent of a transistor it had three connections the plate grid and cathode a voltage applied to the grid would control the amount of electrons from the cathode to the anode and act as an amplifier or a switch depending on how much voltage was applied they are with a few later exceptions made from glass and susceptible to breakage from shock and vibrations they took time to warm up and like light bulbs they used a filament to create the electron flow but the thermal stress of heating up the filament from cold when we're switched on was the biggest cause of failure plus the heater filament also used a lot of power they were also large even the sub miniature versions created for hearing aids and the proximity fuse were much larger than the first commercial transistors if you were to make a smartphone from valves it would be the size of the washington monument valves were used in the first radios and for amplifying very small signals from things like the newly developed microphones these circuits often only needed a handful of valves to work only in the 1940s with the development of the first electronic digital computer the colossus at bletchley park in england did large numbers of valves start to be used with 2 400 valves in the colossus mark ii by 1946 the eniac computer had increased this to 17 000 but this created a new phenomenon called the tyranny of the numbers basically the bigger the system like a computer got the more likely it was to break down and the longer it took to fix and troubleshoot this was such a problem that the speed increase that was promised with the greater complexity of the bigger computers was offset by the downtime it would spend being fixed something which we'll come back to shortly because it is key to where we are today the field effect transistor or fete was an attempt to eliminate some of his issues and make a solid-state version of a triode valve this was first painted in 1925 in canada by the austro-hungarian physicist julius edgar linenfeld whilst lindenfeld came up with the idea and proposed how they would work and could be built the technology of the day was just too primitive for him to build a working prototype it was william shockley working for bell labs in the 1940s unsuccessfully trying to build a fet that led john bardeen and walt brattain working under shockley to discover the transistor effect and by accident they created the point contact transistor and then shortly afterwards the first true commercial version the bipolar junction transistor which went on to allow their use in the first commercial applications of the transistor radios and tvs of the late 1950s and early 1960s with the creation of a transistor it was thought that their smaller size and lower power would be the cure to the tyranny of the numbers but making things smaller didn't make them any more reliable and in many cases just made them more difficult to repair as the transistor developed and the main material used to make them change from germanium to silicon which could work over a much greater temperature range it was realized you could make complete circuits on a piece of silicon consisting of multiple transistors resistors and even capacitors these integrated circuits could be made to do a particular function that before would have used many discrete components and therefore could be much smaller use less power and be more reliable the way bipolar junction transistors or bjts had been fabricated on a silicon was also complicated but several developments in how the silicon was processed led to a breakthrough by mohammed atala and darwon kang at bell labs in 1959 when they created the first metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor or mosfet the advantages the mosfet had was that it required little or no current to control the load compared to bipolar junction transistors they could be much more easily scaled and were much easier to mass produce one of the features that mosfets were found to have was that if a second electrically isolated gate or floating gates were added it could hold a charge that could be capacitively induced into it and act as a memory cell in modern devices this charge can remain without leaking away for over 10 years this is the basis of modern memory devices like flash drives sd cards ssds computer memory and alike and accounts for the vast majority of all the mosfets made together these features would allow the future low power high transistor count ics that would become the defining feature of modern electronics computers and the information revolution but what is astonishing is just how much we have changed in 60 years the previous generation technology valves have changed little in the 114 odd years since their invention in 1907. although the first mosfets were developed in 1960 at the time it was still an experimental technology and slower and less reliable than bipolar junction transistors some in the industry thought that mosfets might be useful for digital applications like pocket calculators and other niche jobs but bjts would remain superior it wasn't until the mid-1960s but it became commercialized finding uses in nasa spacecraft and satellites and military applications where low power was a crucial factor though it wasn't used for the apollo guidance computer that landed on the moon that used direct coupled transistor logic a type of resistor transistor logic or rtl the first mosfets demonstrated in 1960 had a size of 20 micrometers or a 50th of a millimeter across so you could fit about 2 500 mosfets onto a square millimeter of silicon today using the latest seven nanometer die process we can fit 134 million mosfets into each square millimeter in fact one atom of silicon is not 0.2 nanometers across so a 7 nanometer mosfet is just 35 silicon atoms across back in 1965 gordon moore the co-founder of intel said that the number of transistors in nic would double every year this held true until about 1975 when he changed it to doubling every two years and became known as moore's law and this has held pretty much true up until today but there will be an end in the not too far future as mosfets are now becoming so small that eventually the laws of physics will prevent it mosfets are created by a process called photolithography this is a process of photographically transferring geometric shapes of a mask to the surface of a silicon wafer treating them with photoresist then etching away the areas exposed with solvents then laying down another layer and then doing the same again and again gradually building up the layers to create the mosfets and their connections until there is a complete wafer full of integrated circuits the process can make extremely small structures in the order of tens of nanometers across making them smaller means that each mosfet will use less power and you get more processing power onto smaller chips which increases the yield per silicon wafer the cost of making the chips is determined by the number of processes applied to the whole wafer which can be up to 2000 in the most complex chips so the more chips you can get on the wafer the more profitable the whole process is but as the size has gone down the difficulty has gone up the distances are now so small that the wavelength of visible light becomes too large to use for the photolithography so extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength of just 13.5 nanometers is used the problem here is that creating this wavelength of sufficient power and quality is such that only a couple of companies in the world make these euv lithography machines and one a dutch company asml a spin-off of philips dominates with over 60 percent of the market each machine costs over 120 million dollars and is incredibly difficult to make and sells to just a few of the chip foundries including intel tsmc and samsung these are the only machines that can create these seven and soon five nanometer chips like those in the apple m1 the amd ryzen cpus and qualcomm's 5g chipsets in a way we've come full circle asml make the chips that do the machine learning and in turn they need those chips with all the billions of mosfets inside to make the machines that make the chips as we bump up against the laws of physics we are finding new ways of making chips in three dimensions increasing the mosfet count without getting smaller and smaller that and new developments using single atoms to work as transistor switches means that moore's law might have a bit more life in it than we thought so i hope you enjoyed the video and if you did then please thumbs up subscribe click the bell notification and share and for our patrons out there we now release ad-free versions of the videos before they go up onto youtube and with that i'd just like to say a big thank you to all our patrons out there for their ongoing support you

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 704,775

Rating: 4.9515753 out of 5

Keywords: transistor, mosfet, intel, tsmc, chip foundry, electronics, vacuum tube, valves, thermionic valve, moore's law, Gordon moore, The Most significant invention of the 20th Century, paul shillito, curious droid

Id: bHwl8TdEI6k

Length: 16min 53sec (1013 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/bicameral_mind]

The manufacturing hardware at the end is mind blowing. We truly stand on the shoulders of giants to engineer such things. I'm not one to take things for granted, and I'm frequently struck with awe by the complexity and sophistication of technology like smart phones, that is so common now it just kind of fades into the background of daily life.

[u/OSUfan88]

I see Curious Droid, I upvote.

[u/dogswontsniff]

When i couldnt afford tube amps as a teen, that was the word to look for

[u/Kerahcaz]

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I understand everything the video is talking about, but it's still mind boggling to see what we're already capable of. People take this stuff for granted on literally a millisecond(ly?) basis

[u/EdPeggJr]

In other words, transistors.