3 ms·
One thing that everybody seems to glance over is that photolitography made manufacturing of discrete transistors practical and the step to integrated circuits i
by 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 agoThis is true for FETs but not for BJTs
- dfox 9y agoI 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.