Happy Birthday to the Transistor

Dylan Leckie ... Celebrating The Transistor and Disruptive Naval Research

On Dec. 16, 1947, while most Americans were preparing for the Christmas holiday, three physicists were locked in their laboratory, hunched over a work bench, constructing a peculiar gadget that would forever change the world. The transistor — the Bell Laboratories invention built by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley — would become ubiquitous in the future world.

Since its invention those many years ago, investments made by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) have extended and improved the transistor technology developed by Bell Labs. This month, which marks the 65th anniversary of the first transistor, ONR officials remember the invention and are reflecting upon the organization’s contributions to the evolution of the transistor — a technology regarded by many as the most significant scientific development of the 20th century.

Photo by Bob Jagendorf - http://flic.kr/p/buiT3W

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Elliott 803: Computers Move to Transistors

4K of memory!

 

The Memristor - Supercharging Moore's Law

Interesting story from MIT's Technology Review. Here's a link to a video explaining memristors.
Technology Review: Memristors Make Chips Cheaper

Researchers at HP Labs in Palo Alto, CA, are betting that a new fundamental electronic component--the memristor--will keep computer power increasing at this rate for years to come.

Memristors were first predicted in 1971 by Berkeley professor Leon Chua. They are nanoscale devices with unique properties: a variable resistance and the ability to remember the resistance even when the power is off.

After rediscovering Chua's work, researchers at HP Labs built the first working memristor in May of this year. And last week, at the first ever Memristor and Memristor Systems Symposium, in Berkeley, CA, the same team showed how memristors can be integrated into functioning circuits. Their circuits require fewer transistors, allowing more components (and more computing power) to be packed into the same physical space while also using less power to function.

"We're trying to give Moore's Law a boost," says lead researcher Stan Williams, a senior research fellow at HP, referring to a prediction made by Intel founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a computer circuit (and therefore computer performance) should double roughly every two years.