While studying this phenomenon in November 1947, Brattain stumbled upon a way to neutralize their blocking effect and permit the applied field to penetrate deep into the semiconductor material. Perhaps electrons drawn to the semiconductor surface by the electric field were blocking the penetration of this field into the bulk material, thereby preventing it from influencing the conductivity.īardeen’s conjecture spurred a basic research program at Bell Labs into the behaviour of these “surface-state” electrons. The following March, John Bardeen, a theoretical physicist whom Shockley had hired for his group, offered a possible explanation. But attempts to fabricate such a device by Brattain and others in Shockley’s group again failed. He reasoned that an electric field from a third electrode could increase the conductivity of a sliver of semiconductor material just beneath it and thereby allow usable current to flow through the sliver. The postwar search for a solid-state amplifier began in April 1945 with Shockley’s suggestion that silicon and germanium semiconductors could be used to make a field-effect amplifier ( see integrated circuit: Field-effect transistors). With the close of World War II, Kelly reorganized Bell Labs and created a new solid-state research group headed by Shockley. Compounding the difficulty of any theoretical understanding was the problem of controlling the exact composition of these early semiconductor materials, which were binary combinations of different chemical elements (such as copper and oxygen). Semiconductor theory could not yet explain exactly what was happening to electrons inside these devices, especially at the interface between copper and its oxide. Brattain, an experimental physicist already working at Bell Labs, he even tried to fabricate a prototype device in 1939, but it failed completely. Shockley, who proposed a few amplifier designs based on copper-oxide semiconductor materials then used to make diodes.
In 1936 the new director of research at Bell Labs, Mervin Kelly, began recruiting solid-state physicists. SpaceNext50 Britannica presents SpaceNext50, From the race to the Moon to space stewardship, we explore a wide range of subjects that feed our curiosity about space!Įxecutives at Bell Labs had recognized that semiconductors might lead to solid-state alternatives to the electron-tube amplifiers and electromechanical switches employed throughout the nationwide Bell telephone system.Learn about the major environmental problems facing our planet and what can be done about them! Saving Earth Britannica Presents Earth’s To-Do List for the 21st Century.Britannica Beyond We’ve created a new place where questions are at the center of learning.100 Women Britannica celebrates the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, highlighting suffragists and history-making politicians.
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