page_title: Electrical engineering
section_title: Solid-state electronics
hierarchical_section_title: Electrical engineering / History / Solid-state electronics
caption_attribution_description: English: MOSFET structure
context_page_description: Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design and application of equipment, devices and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the latter half of the 19th century after commercialization of the electric telegraph, the telephone, and electrical power generation, distribution and use.
  Electrical engineering is now divided into a wide range of fields, including computer engineering, systems engineering, power engineering, telecommunications, radio-frequency engineering, signal processing, instrumentation, and electronics. Many of these disciplines overlap with other engineering branches, spanning a huge number of specializations including hardware engineering, power electronics, electromagnetics and waves, microwave engineering, nanotechnology, electrochemistry, renewable energies, mechatronics, and electrical materials science.
  Electrical engineers typically hold a degree in electrical engineering or electronic engineering. Practising engineers may have professional certification and be members of a professional body or an international standards organization.
context_section_description: The first working transistor was a point-contact transistor invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain while working under William Shockley at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) in 1947. They then invented the bipolar junction transistor in 1948. While early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis, they opened the door for more compact devices.
  The surface passivation process, which electrically stabilized silicon surfaces via thermal oxidation, was developed by Mohamed M. Atalla at BTL in 1957. This led to the development of the monolithic integrated circuit chip. The first integrated circuits were the hybrid integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958 and the monolithic integrated circuit chip invented by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959.
  The MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, or MOS transistor) was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at BTL in 1959. It was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. It revolutionized the electronics industry, becoming the most widely used electronic device in the world. The MOSFET is the basic element in most modern electronic equipment, and has been central to the electronics revolution, the microelectronics revolution, and the Digital Revolution. The MOSFET has thus been credited as the birth of modern electronics, and possibly the most important invention in electronics.
  The MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuit chips. Atalla first proposed the concept of the MOS integrated circuit (MOS IC) chip in 1960, followed by Kahng in 1961. The earliest experimental MOS IC chip to be fabricated was built by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA Laboratories in 1962. MOS technology enabled Moore's law, the doubling of transistors on an IC chip every two years, predicted by Gordon Moore in 1965. Silicon-gate MOS technology was developed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild in 1968. Since then, the MOSFET has been the basic building block of modern electronics. The mass-production of silicon MOSFETs and MOS integrated circuit chips, along with continuous MOSFET scaling miniaturization at an exponential pace (as predicted by Moore's law), has since led to revolutionary changes in technology, economy, culture and thinking.
  The Apollo program which culminated in landing astronauts on the Moon with Apollo 11 in 1969 was enabled by NASA's adoption of advances in semiconductor electronic technology, including MOSFETs in the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) and silicon integrated circuit chips in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC).
  The development of MOS integrated circuit technology in the 1960s led to the invention of the microprocessor in the early 1970s. The first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004, released in 1971. It began with the "Busicom Project" as Masatoshi Shima's three-chip CPU design in 1968, before Sharp's Tadashi Sasaki conceived of a single-chip CPU design, which he discussed with Busicom and Intel in 1968. The Intel 4004 was then designed and realized by Federico Faggin at Intel with his silicon-gate MOS technology, along with Intel's Marcian Hoff and Stanley Mazor and Busicom's Masatoshi Shima. The microprocessor led to the development of microcomputers and personal computers, and the microcomputer revolution.
caption: Metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), the basic building of modern electronics.
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