what he was accelerating in that high voltage cathode ray tube.
Well, that discovery in 1897 was followed in fairly short order, only 50 years
later, by the invention of the transistor at the Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.
And those three physicists that made that important discovery,
open up the era of modern solid state electronics.
They created a small transistor using a small, single crystal of germanium.
That has lead now, of course, to the the use of silicon,
that element just above germanium in the periodic table, as the more or
less ubiquitous platform for modern integrated circuits.
And so that integrated circuit was actually invented just
less than 25 years after the invention of the transistor itself.
1971, Intel Corporation introduced that first
microprocessor that contained a couple of thousand transistors and
a small printed circuit on a platform of silicon.
That technology has continued to be miniaturized over the decade since.
And in fact, Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel Corporation,
using his scientific intuition, said that we should be able to double the number of
transistors in these fine scale integrated circuit patterns every two years.
Well, that's turned out to be a remarkably precise projection of the technology.
And so now over more than four decades, the scientists and
engineers in the electronics industry have been able to follow that,
what is now known as Moore's Law.
Doubling the number of transistors on the integrated circuit chip every two years.
So, now we're going to go to a series of video clips of
lectures on the nature of semiconductors in modern electronic devices.
But before we do that, we should cover a few vocabulary terms.
You'll hear reference to Fermi function, to valence band and conduction band.
A Fermi function is nothing more than the probability that an electron
will be at a particular energy level.
We see that the Fermi function goes from one, or
100% probability at low energies, up to zero at high energies.
And follows something of an S-shaped curve as we go from low to high energies.
Now the result is that, that S-shaped curve
will overlap the valence band and conduction band.
So the Fermi function, named after the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
Who discovered so
much of the nature of electronics and modern physics in the early 20th century.