ABSTRACT
The world of electronics started with the invention of the vacuum tube (a two-terminal device—the terminals are anode and cathode) by the famous English physicist John Ambrose Fleming in 1895, based on the principle called “Edison Effect.” In 1883, Thomas Alva Edison found that electrons could flow from one metal conductor to another through a vacuum. In other words, current flow is possible through a vacuum and this phenomenon is called the Edison effect. The main drawbacks of the first electronic device—a vacuum tube—were the low reliability and very high-power consumption; the device also required cooling mechanisms. Two years later, Lee De Forest from the United States discovered a similar type of device called a triode (a three-terminal device—the terminals are anode, cathode, and grid), which had the characteristics of an amplifier. These vacuum tube devices (diode, triode, tetrode, and pentode) were the main obstacles in the road of progress since the size of these devices could not be reduced too much. The search for new device architectures, initiated by the development of semiconductors, resulted in the discovery of the first solid-state device called a PN junction diode. The major breakthrough in the semiconductor industry was the invention of point contact transistors by Brattain and Bardeen at Bell Laboratories, USA, in 1947. At the same period of time, Shockley developed the first NPN transistor, which is widely used in radio frequency (RF) and analog circuits today. It has been more than five decades since the invention of the integrated circuit (IC) technology based on the idea given by Jack Kilby from Texas Instruments. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce decided to throw away all the wires and tried to connect the resistors, capacitors, diodes, and transistors on the same piece of wafer internally. One of the most important aspects in the evolution of IC technology is the physical feature sizes of the transistors are reduced continually over time as the lithography technologies used to define these features become available. The tremendous and steady progress in IC technology is 110also propelled by the development of various etching and deposition techniques. The first metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) on a silicon substrate using SiO2 as the gate oxide was fabricated in 1960 (Kahng and Atalla). Since then, complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) transistors have become the technology of choice for high-speed, low-power digital circuits, and bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) are used primarily in RF and analog circuits only.
