During the 1950s, meanwhile, scientists and engineers at Bell Labs and Texas Instruments were developing advanced technologies needed to produce silicon transistors. Because of its higher melting temperature and greater reactivity, silicon was much more difficult to work with than germanium, but it offered major prospects for better performance, especially in switching applications. Germanium transistors make leaky switches; substantial leakage currents can flow when these devices are supposedly in their off state. Silicon transistors have far less leakage. In 1954 Texas Instruments produced the first commercially available silicon junction transistors and quickly dominated this new market—especially for military applications, in which their high cost was of little concern.

In the mid-1950s Bell Labs focused its transistor-development efforts around new diffusion technologies, in which very narrow semiconductor layers—with thicknesses measured in microns, or millionths of a metre—are prepared by diffusing impurity atoms into the semiconductor surface from a hot gas. Inside a diffusion furnace the impurity atoms penetrate more readily into the silicon or germanium surface; their penetration depth is controlled by varying the density, temperature, and pressure of the gas as well as the processing time. (See integrated circuit: Fabricating ICs.) For the first time, diodes and transistors produced by these diffusion implantation processes functioned at frequencies above 100 megahertz (100 million cycles per second). These diffused-base transistors could be used in receivers and transmitters for FM radio and television, which operate at such high frequencies.

Another important breakthrough occurred at Bell Labs in 1955, when Carl Frosch and Link Derick developed a means of producing a glassy silicon dioxide outer layer on the silicon surface during the diffusion process. This layer offered transistor producers a promising way to protect the silicon underneath from further impurities once the diffusion process was finished and the desired electrical properties had been established.

Texas Instruments, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, and other companies took the lead in applying these diffusion technologies to the large-scale manufacture of transistors. At Fairchild, physicist Jean Hoerni developed the planar manufacturing process, whereby the various semiconductor layers and their sensitive interfaces are embedded beneath a protective silicon dioxide outer layer. The company was soon making and selling planar silicon transistors, largely for military applications. Led by Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore, Fairchild’s scientists and engineers extended this revolutionary technique to the manufacture of integrated circuits.

In the late 1950s Bell Labs researchers developed ways to use the new diffusion technologies to realize Shockley’s original 1945 idea of a field-effect transistor (FET). To do so, they had to overcome the problem of surface-state electrons, which would otherwise have blocked external electric fields from penetrating into the semiconductor. They succeeded by carefully cleaning the silicon surface and growing a very pure silicon dioxide layer on it. This approach reduced the number of surface-state electrons at the interface between the silicon and oxide layers, permitting fabrication of the first successful field-effect transistor in 1960 at Bell Labs—which, however, did not pursue its development any further.

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Refinements of the FET design by other companies, especially RCA and Fairchild, resulted in the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) during the early 1960s. The key problems to be solved were the stability and reliability of these MOS transistors, which relied upon interactions occurring at or near the sensitive silicon surface rather than deep inside. The two firms began to make MOS transistors commercially available in late 1964.

In early 1963 Frank Wanlass at Fairchild developed the complementary MOS (CMOS) transistor circuit, based on a pair of MOS transistors. This approach eventually proved ideal for use in integrated circuits because of its simplicity of production and very low power dissipation during standby operation. Stability problems continued to plague MOS transistors, however, until researchers at Fairchild developed solutions in the mid-1960s. By the end of the decade, MOS transistors were beginning to displace bipolar junction transistors in microchip manufacturing. Since the late 1980s CMOS has been the technology of choice for digital applications, while bipolar transistors are now used primarily for analog and microwave devices.

The p-n junction

The operation of junction transistors, as well as most other semiconductor devices, depends heavily on the behaviour of electrons and holes at the interface between two dissimilar layers, known as a p-n junction. Discovered in 1940 by Bell Labs electrochemist Russell Ohl, p-n junctions are formed by adding two different impurity elements to adjacent regions of germanium or silicon. The addition of these impurity elements is called doping. Atoms of elements from Group 15 of the periodic table (which possess five valence electrons), such as phosphorus or arsenic, contribute an electron that has no natural resting place within the crystal lattice. These excess electrons are therefore loosely bound and relatively free to roam about, acting as charge carriers that can conduct electrical current. Atoms of elements from Group 13 (which have three valence electrons), such as boron or aluminum, induce a deficit of electrons when added as impurities, effectively creating “holes” in the lattice. These positively charged quantum mechanical entities are also fairly free to roam around and conduct electricity. Under the influence of an electric field, the electrons and holes move in opposite directions. During and immediately after World War II, chemists and metallurgists at Bell Labs perfected techniques of adding impurities to high-purity silicon and germanium to induce the desired electron-rich layer (known as the n-layer) and the electron-poor layer (known as the p-layer) in these semiconductors, as described in the section Development of transistors.

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A p-n junction acts as a rectifier, similar to the old point-contact crystal rectifiers, permitting easy flow of current in only a single direction. If no voltage is applied across the junction, electrons and holes will gather on opposite sides of the interface to form a depletion layer that will act as an insulator between the two sides. A negative voltage applied to the n-layer will drive the excess electrons within it toward the interface, where they will combine with the positively charged holes attracted there by the electric field. Current will then flow easily. If instead a positive voltage is applied to the n-layer, the resulting electric field will draw electrons away from the interface, so combinations of them with holes will occur much less often. In this case current will not flow (other than tiny leakage currents). Thus, electricity will flow in only one direction through a p-n junction.