Condensed Matter / Physics / Quantum Mechanics / etc.

How Things Work: The Field Effect Transistor

I don’t know how to do this on a small scale in a practical way, but I do know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can’t we make them very small, make them of little wires, little elements – and by little, I mean little. ~Richard Feynman (1959) As of 2012, the highest transistor count in a commercially available CPU is over 2.5 billion transistors. ~Wikipedia In my article on quantum tunneling, I mistakenly claimed that diodes and transistors made use of this phenomenon. In an effort to correct my mistake, I’m going to explain