MOS, SOI and FinFET Technology
The invention of vacuum tubes is what launched the electronics industry. These devices would control the flow of electrons in vacuum. But, after the second world war, it was observed that due to a huge number of discrete components, the complexity and power consumption of these devices were increasing significantly. As a result, the performance of the devices would keep going down. One of the examples is of a Boeing B-29 which during the war, would consist of 300-1000 vacuum tubes. Each additional component would reduce the reliability and increase troubleshooting time. A major breakthrough came in 1947, when John Baden, William Shockley and Watter Brattain of Bell labs unveiled the first functioning point contact Germanium transistor. In 1950, Shockley developed the first Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT). In comparison to a vacuum tube, transistors are more reliable, power efficient and of lesser size. The transistor is a 3-terminal device which can be viewed as an electrically contr...