We are living in a time of incredible growth and that has already started to transform the way we live. It is the age of information, with forty percent of the world's population currently connected to the internet.
The human race is more entertaining than ever before, but what led to this amazing single invention that gave rise to the smartphone generation? The transistor is information itself. Even this is just a series of ones, and zero is beaming across the planet to be interpreted by the processes in your computers. Without the transistor, I wouldn't have access to the wealth of information online to do my research. I wouldn't be able to use my animation software to make these articles, and I certainly wouldn't be able to share them here for the world to see. The transistor is so simple, but it is the foundation of all our modern computers, so understand its impact. We need to understand the history of science behind it before the transistor existed. We use vaccum tubes, which are these bulky evacuated glass bottles. The trial advantage you had consisted of three parts: the cathode grid, anode, and the cathode itself. It occurs to pass through the cathode, and it begins to heat up, causing it to release. electrons have been removed from the tube. The electrons have very little resistance to their movement, and they are attracted to the positively charged anode. This completes a circuit and energy flows, but we can manipulate this flow of electrons in many useful ways with the grid. For example, we can use it as a switch. If we play the lie pole here, it will only light up when there's a positive voltage. If we apply a negative voltage, the negative charge will repel electrons trying to pass true. This is the foundation of binary coding, which is the one in the areas that gave birth to the age of information here. One is a positive voltage, and zero is a negative. One turns the light on the zero, and the other turns it off.
The world's first general purpose electronic computer that any act used eighteen thousand vacuum troops for foreign calculations designed by John Markley and J. Press for an accurate It was completed in one thousand nine hundred and forty-five. It was designed specifically to calculate trajectories for an Italian wood or two, and a calculation that would take a human a day to calculate took any act thirty minutes. this thing weighed thirty tons and took up an entire room. It was incredibly powerful but hungry as the vacuum tube cathodes needed to be heated to work, which also meant that the vacuum tubes burned out regularly and needed to be replaced. All this to perform a function on your phone, basically, those angry birds today. Its computing power could be contained on a silicon chip no larger than a green assign. That's thanks to their consistency. A modern phone contains approximately two billion transistors that perform the exacting job of the vacant. on the nano scale, let's look at how it works. Many of you will recognise the transistor as one of these, but this is a true hold transistor that you can buy from hobby electronic stores for your diy projects. The transistors in your CPU are microscopic and manufactured with an incredible position when machines are on thin wafers of silicon crystal that are sliced off silicon like this. What makes silicon so special that an entire section of the sand francy area has been nicknamed after the material? Silicon
is a semiconductor, which means that conducting properties can be tailored by introducing impurities to the crystal structure. Silicon has four electrons and a failing shell. This is the electrons, and it determines many of the chemical properties of the adams. Adams wanted eight electrons in that chill, as this makes them very stable. So silicon readily forms, covering up one with foreign neighbouring silicon atoms to gain those extra electrons. Now, if we introduce those imperatives to this pure system crystal, we can change how conductance occurs if we introduce advisers, which has five electrons. The extra electron is left free to run the crystal structure. This extra electron makes the whole thing negatively judged, which is where the name comes from. The p type is positively charged because it is doped with boron, which has three electrons in its failing sheller. This structure wants to gain its fine electrons and steel electrons from its neighbouring atoms. The conductivity of the material has just been increased as we increased the number of mobile charges when we arranged entire empty-type semiconductors like this and attached terminals to each of the world's most prevalent transistors, the m-P-N transistor. Free electrons from the entire system will migrate over to fill the p type's holes.
creates a boundary layer called the depletion layer, which prevents more electrons from passing through due to the negative charges repealing each other. But when a positive voltage is applied to the base, it gates that pollution layer and allows current to flow through, completing the circuit. As you can see, this is very similar to the function of the vacuum tube.
So how exactly does this allow computers to perform all these complex functions that we see today? Let's look at a very basic example. Let's add two numbers together. First, we need to learn how numbers are represented in binary. They're the ones in zero that are used to sort data. This is the number fifteen, which is the largest number you can represent with forbids. The first bit represents one, the next two, four. And finally, eight added up the articles to fifteen. This pattern continues, with each successive bit representing double the previous. So we can add an additional bit if we want to count up to thirty-one. Let's add five and six together to do this. As you can see, this gives us the number eleven, as well as the simplest circuit that can do it. is a half-hour test, which contains two types of logic gates. These are devices that can modify the binary code because they are built using transistors. The first of the extraordinary codes, which gives only one input, is If Votes are zero or one, it gives a zero. The second logical gate is engaged, which gives a zero for everything except when both inputs are one. If we worry about these logical gates like this, we create a half-other, which gives two outputs: some and our carry. This allows us to add our binary number one bit at a time, and a more complicated circuit is needed to perform the calculation in one step. Modern computers can perform millions of these calculations per second, and they're still getting faster. The cofounder of Intel Coordinator noticed the trend in one thousand nine hundred and sixty-five that the density of transistors on integrated circuits doubled every two years. That trend has held until very recently. but it is starting to slow down. One of the reasons for this is the less well-known prediction, more second law or rocks, that the cost of manufacturing these devices will double every four years.
As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult for chip manufacturers to shrink their products while still making a profit. problem that transistors are facing is quantum. As these transistors get smaller, so do the barriers between different sections. The barriers between each section of the transistor are getting so thin that electrons can pass right through them with no definitive successor to the silicon transistor. This incredible period of growth over the last fifty years could be put out in the near future. Some want to hire this quantum mechanic to perform calculations faster than any transistor ever could. Others want decentralised computing power and to create the so-called "internet of things" that are intelligent themselves, so they plan to shift their focus from increases in speed to decreases in power consumption.
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