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I don't think there was much incentive to make things smaller before the transistor was invented. Also, transistors are used in most analog electronics. You can

I don't think there was much incentive to make things smaller before the transistor was invented. Also, transistors are used in most analog electronics. You can't do much without them since they let you amplify signals and apply negative feedback. But to answer your second question. I don't think we could have skipped the vacuum-tube era. It's because we already had applications for those sorts of electronics (and unreliable mechanical relays that were replaced with transistor switches) that researchers realized the potential for transistors in the first place. Even after the transistor was invented there was still a lot of research necessary to make them feasible in practice. The first one was germanium if I recall correctly and it took a while before silicon transistors were viable. Edit: Also, sort of unrelated, non silicon semiconductors are still used a lot because they can switch faster, and different color LEDs use different semiconductors because they emit different colors of light, which is also related to why different color LEDs have different voltage drops.

dfox 9y ago
One thing that everybody seems to glance over is that photolitography made manufacturing of discrete transistors practical and the step to integrated circuits is not that big from that. Edit: what you buy as a typical discrete transistor is in fact integrated circuit which contains tens to thousands of parallel connected transistors. Also I believe that photolitography-like processes were used before semiconductors (and I would not be too surprised if production of at least some mass manufactured valves involved photolitography).
- dmitrygr 9y ago
  This is true for FETs but not for BJTs
  - dfox 9y ago
    I originally intended to use IRF640 as an example, as for HexFET it is painfully obvious that there are separate parallel connected transistors. For typical BJTs it depends on how you define "separate transistor". The structure in typical BJT has one contiguos junction, but its geometry is non-trivial enough that you can well think of it as multiple paralleled transistors.

dfox 9y ago

One thing that everybody seems to glance over is that photolitography made manufacturing of discrete transistors practical and the step to integrated circuits is not that big from that. Edit: what you buy as a typical discrete transistor is in fact integrated circuit which contains tens to thousands of parallel connected transistors. Also I believe that photolitography-like processes were used before semiconductors (and I would not be too surprised if production of at least some mass manufactured valves involved photolitography).

dmitrygr 9y ago
This is true for FETs but not for BJTs
- dfox 9y ago
  I originally intended to use IRF640 as an example, as for HexFET it is painfully obvious that there are separate parallel connected transistors. For typical BJTs it depends on how you define "separate transistor". The structure in typical BJT has one contiguos junction, but its geometry is non-trivial enough that you can well think of it as multiple paralleled transistors.