The germanium itself sat on a metal plate ... current can start to flow from one side to the other. In the case of Brattain's transistor, current flowed towards the second gold contact.

One of the graduate students, Seymour Benzer, accidentally discovered that a crystal of germanium -- a semiconductor which was not well understood at the time -- could withstand higher voltage ...

After the war, from the 1950s to the early 1970s, germanium's development as a semiconductor in transistors paved the way for its use in solid-state electronics, until it was replaced by its more ...

In some cases, 4 out of 5 of the devices were not usable. The transistors were not that good even when they did work. The first transistors were germanium which has high leakage and worse thermal ...

Germanium is very similar to silicon, but when one layer is grown on top of the other to form the base of the transistor, the resulting transistor can switch faster and yield higher performance.

In the case of the p-channel transistor, silicon germanium is now used instead of silicon to form the source and drain regions and to induce uniaxial compressive strain in the silicon channel ...

Punch-through is a severe case of barrier lowering ... There are many ways to enhance transistor performance and mobility. One way is to use thin germanium film in the channel because germanium has ...

In germanium-based bipolar transistors, high temperatures cause current to leak. This, in turn, causes the transistor to heat even more and eventually become unstable or self-destruct. Obviously ...