On 22 Oct 1925, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld (a Polish1 professor in Germany) patented the field-effect transistor (FET). [LIL1] In 1928, he also patented the metal oxide semiconductor FET (MOSFET). [LIL2] Lilienfeld's designs worked. [ARN98][ROS95] The much later point-contact transistor (Bell Labs, 1948) was a dead end: [LIL4] today, almost all of the billions of trillions of transistors in our computers and smartphones are FETs of the Lilienfeld type.
In 1934, German engineer Oskar Heil patented another FET variant. [HEIL] Two decades after Lilienfeld, researchers at Bell Labs not only experimentally confirmed the field-effect described in Lilienfeld's patents [ARN98] —see the priority dispute Lilienfeld vs Bell Labs below—but also patented a point-contact transistor (PCT, patent filed on 26 February 1948 by William Shockley & John Bardeen & Walter Brattain). [BRA48] A few months later, the transistron (a junction field-effect transistor or JFET) was patented by German physicists Herbert F. Mataré and Heinrich Welker in France at Compagnie des Freins et Signaux Westinghouse (patent filed on 13 August 1948). [MAT48]
The PCT and the transistron were the first commercial transistors. In hindsight, however, the 1948 PCT—which was "never quite practical" and "merely a detour" [ARN98] —was a dead end, and today, almost all transistors are FETs of the Lilienfeld type, in particular, certain MOSFET [LIL2] variants patented by Egyptian engineer Mohamed M. Atalla and Korean engineer Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1960. [ATA60]
According to legal files (1948) examined by American physicist Robert G. Arns, [ARN98] William Shockley & Gerald Pearson at Bell Labs had confirmed the field-effect described in Lilienfeld's patents. Unfortunately, "published scientific, technical, and historical papers by these Bell scientists never mention either Lilienfeld’s or Heil’s prior work," [ARN98] "not even a 1948 paper [SHO48] in which Shockley & Pearson demonstrated the field-effect experimentally." [ARN98]
In November 1948, various patent applications by Bell Labs were rejected for being too similar to Lilienfeld's (and Heil's) much earlier designs. [PAT48] (16 years later, in 1964, J. B. Johnson of Bell Labs claimed that some of Lilienfeld's FETs didn't work when he tested them, however, Arns points out [ARN98] that this statement "appears to have been deliberately misleading.") Later, some people claimed that Lilienfeld did not implement his ideas since "high-purity materials needed to make such devices work were decades away from being ready," [CHLI] but the 1991 thesis by Bret Crawford offered evidence that "these claims are incorrect." [CRA91] Lilienfeld was an accomplished experimenter, and in 1995, Joel Ross [ROS95] "replicated the prescriptions of the same Lilienfeld patent. He was able to produce devices that remained stable for months." [ARN98] Also, in 1981, semiconductor physicist H. E. Stockman confirmed that "Lilienfeld demonstrated his remarkable tubeless radio receiver on many occasions". [EMM13]
Before the above issues became widely known, three Bell Labs researchers shared the Nobel Prize for the transistor, which should have been awarded to Lilienfeld. This was a major malfunction in the Nobel Prize selection process—and not the last one. [NOB] Bardeen, one of the 3 awardees, finally admitted in 1988 that Lilienfeld "had the basic concept of controlling the flow of current in a semiconductor to make an amplifying device," [BAR88][ARN98] and that his own point-contact transistor "may have slowed the advancement of the transistor field because it diverted the semiconductor program from junction and field-effect transistors which subsequently proved to be far more useful commercially." [ARN98]
As of 2025, there is no reasonable doubt that the inventor of the transistor is Julius Edgar Lilienfeld.
Since the invention of the transistor, computers have become much faster through integrated circuits (ICs) gathering many transistors on the same microchip.
In 1949, German engineer Werner Jacobi at Siemens filed the first patent for an IC semiconductor with several transistors on a common substrate (granted in 1952). [IC49-14]
In 1958, American engineer Jack Kilby demonstrated an IC with external wires. In 1959, Robert Noyce presented a monolithic IC. [IC14]
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