the.com/transistor
the tiny switch that taught sand to think and crammed the future onto a fingernail.
means A small semiconductor device that switches or amplifies electrical signals, serving as the fundamental building block of nearly all modern electronics.
from A 1948 coinage from Bell Labs, blending "transfer" and "resistor" — the new device transferred current across a resistor-like body. Engineer John R. Pierce is credited with suggesting the name, beating out other proposals; it captured how the gadget transferred a signal through a varying resistance.
- named for
- a blend of transfer and resistor
- chip count
- modern processors pack billions of them
- size now
- smaller than a human virus
- nobel prize
- its inventors won physics in 1956
- first one
- 1947 Bell Labs gadget, held by hand
for instance
intel 4004 — first commercial microprocessor with 2,300 transistors, released november 1971
apple m1 chip — 16 billion transistors on a single chip, released november 2020