The path to the conception of the junction transistor

Abstract

The failure in 1945 of experiments proposed by Shockley, on what today would be called thin-film field-effect transistors, was a creative failure that stimulated Bardeen in early 1946 to propose that a surface-state shield blocked the field from the semiconductor's interior. Bell Laboratories' "transistor group to be" for the next eighteen months focused, not on practical, but on scientific aspects of the failure. Focus on the practical resumed (with a step-function increase, lasting several months, in "the will to think" about new concepts of semiconductor amplifiers, as measured by the rate of filling of laboratory notebook pages by Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley) on 17 November 1947, when in his surface-state research, Brattain penetrated the shield by applying the field through an electrolyte. Within six days, patentable field-effect transistor inventions were conceived. Although useless as devices, these inventions were creative failures used by Bardeen and Brattain to discover the point-contact transistor three weeks later. Five weeks after this discovery, Shockley conceived the junction transistor while designing "imref" experiments on the point-contact transistor's inversion layer so that in 1951, the point-contact transistor in its turn became a creative failure when replaced by the junction transistor whose conception it had aided. But the path of thought to the conception of the junction transistor and the subsequent path to its practical realization are proven to be highly indirect by historical research on laboratory notebook entries. Specifically, Shockley's conception of the junction transistor was delayed by at least four months because he missed opportunities, obvious by hindsight, to recognize the possibility of minority carrier injection. The author hopes that the presentation of details of his limitations in making this important invention may help readers to accept their own limitations and, thereby, to become more persistent and, hence, creative.