Researchers have revived and improved a once-reliable technique to identify and count defects in transistors, the building blocks of modern electronic devices such as smartphones and computers.

The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

In 1947, Shockley, Brattain and Bardeen were investigating the field effect transistor but lead them into inventing the bipolar transistor instead. In 1952, the field effect transistor of Shockley was ...

What Is A Semiconductor Gate? The gate electrode is a thin film of a conductive material deposited on top of an insulator layer in a transistor. The gate sits above a channel formed in the main body ...

The new transistors (above) have vertical current-carrying channels. In older designs (inset), the channels lie flat under the gates. In an effort to keep squeezing more components onto silicon chips, ...