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Field-effect transistor

The field-effect transistor (FET) is an electronic device which uses an electric field to control the flow of current. FETs are devices with three terminals: source, gate, and drain. FETs control the flow of current by the application of a voltage to the gate, which in turn alters the conductivity between the drain and source. FETs are also known as unipolar transistors since they involve single-carrier-type operation. That is, FETs use electrons or holes as charge carriers in their operation, but not both. Many different types of field effect transistors exist. Field effect transistors generally display very high input impedance at low frequencies. The most widely used field-effect transistor is the MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor). The concept of a field-effect transistor (FET) was first patented by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925 and by Oskar Heil in 1934, but they were unable to build a working practical semiconducting device based on the concept. The transistor effect was later observed and explained by the team of William Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947, shortly after the 17-year patent expired. Shockley initially attempted to build a working FET, by trying to modulate the conductivity of a semiconductor, but was unsuccessful, mainly due to problems with the surface states, the dangling bond, and the germanium and copper compound materials. In the course of trying to understand the mysterious reasons behind their failure to build a working FET, this led them to instead inventing the bipolar point-contact and junction transistors. The first FET device to be successfully built was the junction field-effect transistor (JFET). A JFET was first patented by Heinrich Welker in 1945. The static induction transistor (SIT), a type of JFET with a short channel, was invented by Japanese engineers Jun-ichi Nishizawa and Y. Watanabe in 1950. Following Shockley's theoretical treatment on JFET in 1952, a working practical JFET was built by George F. Dacey and Ian M. Ross in 1953. However, while the JFET was a useful device, it was not the type of FET that Shockley had originally sought to build. A breakthrough in FET research came with the work of Mohamed Atalla in the late 1950s. He investigated the surface properties of silicon semiconductors at Bell Labs, where he adopted a new method of semiconductor device fabrication, coating a silicon wafer with an insulating layer of silicon oxide, so that electricity could reliably penetrate to the conducting silicon below, overcoming the surface states that prevented electricity from reaching the semiconducting layer. This is known as surface passivation, a method that became critical to the semiconductor industry as it made possible the mass-production of silicon integrated circuits. Building on his surface passivation method, he developed the metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) process, which he presented in 1957. He later proposed the MOS process could be used to build the first working silicon FET, which he began working on building with the help of Dawon Kahng. The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng in 1959. The MOSFET largely superseded both the bipolar transistor and the JFET, and had a profound effect on digital electronic development. With its high scalability, and much lower power consumption and higher density than bipolar junction transistors, the MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuits. The MOSFET is also capable of handling higher power than the JFET. The MOSFET thus became the most common type of transistor in computers, electronics, and communications technology (such as smartphones). The US Patent and Trademark Office calls the MOSFET a 'groundbreaking invention that transformed life and culture around the world'. CMOS (complementary MOS) was invented by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1963. The first report of a floating-gate MOSFET was made by Dawon Kahng and Simon Sze in 1967. A double-gate MOSFET was first demonstrated in 1984 by Electrotechnical Laboratory researchers Toshihiro Sekigawa and Yutaka Hayashi. FinFET (fin field-effect transistor), a type of 3D non-planar multi-gate MOSFET, originated from the research of Digh Hisamoto and his team at Hitachi Central Research Laboratory in 1989. FETs can be majority-charge-carrier devices, in which the current is carried predominantly by majority carriers, or minority-charge-carrier devices, in which the current is mainly due to a flow of minority carriers. The device consists of an active channel through which charge carriers, electrons or holes, flow from the source to the drain. Source and drain terminal conductors are connected to the semiconductor through ohmic contacts. The conductivity of the channel is a function of the potential applied across the gate and source terminals.

[ "Transistor", "Sziklai pair", "Induced high electron mobility transistor", "p channel", "ion selective field effect transistor", "metal semiconductor field effect transistors" ]
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