Devices Go Solid State

This is the story of the birth of the transistor and of the growing understanding of the theory and technology of solid state devices. The transistor was invented at Bell Laboratories by William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. They received the Nobel Prize in 1956.The next advance was putting more and more units on a substrate, initiating the age of integrated circuits. Moore’s Law in its original form states that the number of transistors on a substrate will double every year. As the price of computers using transistors plummeted, the number of computers sold rose fast.

A Solid Beginning

Anderson chooses a job at Washington State College over a boring-sounding job at Westinghouse. Van Vleck intervenes to arrange an interview with William Shockley at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Anderson declines Washington and accepts a job offer from Shockley in 1949. A short history of Bell Labs follows, including the creation of a Solid-State Physics group after the war to, among other things, seek a replacement for vacuum tubes. A short description of solid-state physics follows. The team of Shockley, John Bardeen, and William Brattain invent the transistor and Shockley alienates everyone. Shockley tells Anderson to work on ferroelectric materials. Anderson dislikes the work but is personally impressed by Shockley as a physicist.

The ECD Community: A Social Invention (1965–2007)

This chapter portrays the ways Stan and Iris Ovshinsky made ECD an expression of their progressive social values as well as an advanced R&D organization. A social democratic enclave sustained by capitalism, ECD tried to maintain an egalitarian, supportive culture even as it grew to over a thousand employees. ECD enabled staff members to develop unsuspected talents, with support for continuing education and the appointment of women and minorities to important positions. Its democratic corporate culture also enabled it to develop a flexible research community, where scientists moved among concurrent programs to contribute wherever they were needed. Its research staff was joined by a distinguished group of consultants, which included Nobel laureates like I. I. Rabi, Sir Nevill Mott, and John Bardeen, as well as several talented younger scientists. ECD also reached out into the larger community with its Institute for Amorphous Studies, which sponsored public talks on many subjects.

The Silicon Tide: Relations between Things Epistemic and Things of Function in the Semiconductor World

This article explores the changing interactions between fundamental physics and the learning and skills situated near engineering and enterprise as related to microelectronics and in particular to semiconductors that occurred over the span of the twentieth century. The discussion draws on selected episodes in the silicon tide with reference to an understanding of semiconducting to the invention of transistors and their development. The focus is on theories, experiments, models, invention, materials, products, manufacturing markets, and management from Guglielmo Marconi’s introduction of Hertzian communication to the 1947 invention of the transistor by John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain, the development of the microprocessor in 1970, and the launch in 2011 of the nanoscale Finfet transistor family by the Intel company.

SUPERCONDUCTIVITY: FROM ELECTRON INTERACTION TO NUCLEAR SUPERFLUIDITY

I present an expanded version of a talk given at the Urbana symposium that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the microscopic theory of superconductivity by Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer — BCS. I recall at some length, the work with my Ph.D. mentor, David Bohm, and my postdoctoral mentor, John Bardeen, on electron interaction in metals during the period 1948–55 that helped pave the way for BCS, describe the immediate impact of BCS on a small segment of the Princeton physics community in the early spring of 1957, and discuss the extent to which the Bardeen–Pines–Frohlich effective electron-electron interaction provided a criterion for superconductivity in the periodic system. I describe my lectures on BCS at Niels Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics in June 1957 that led to the proposal of nuclear superfluidity, discuss nuclear and cosmic superfluids briefly, and close with a tribute to John Bardeen, whose birth centennial we celebrated in 2008, and who was my mentor, close colleague, and dear friend.