For those not doing the time warp again, the transistor has just turned 74.

The transistor is amazing.

What’s great about it is that we can completely ignore it and take it for granted 24/7/365 and it keeps serving us regardless.

One of the amazing things is that as transistors get smaller, they get faster, use less power, are more reliable, and cheaper per transistor.

That is why we have cheap, fast, and powerful computers and cell phones.

Faster, yes. Use less power is debatable. I would like to see some graphs. Yes the transistor inside a chip is very small, but you have to connect it to other transistors and here things start to get fishy. And when everything is a synthesis library, is even worse. The only real better transistors are in analog ICs.

Faster, maybe? I recall seeing a graph towards the end of the planar transistor days (maybe around 22 nm?) that FO4 speed peaked around 45 nm. Overall clockspeeds continued to improve because of lower power usage and thermal limits, but in isolation a smaller transistor is not necessarily faster; less capacitance and inductance, but also more resistance.

Can't find a source for that recollection, and http://vcl.ece.ucdavis.edu/pubs/2017.02.VLSIintegration.Tech... seems to contradict it, so take with a supersized grain of salt.

> Faster

I was thinking since the early days of the transistor, which really began around 1947/48.

Or even since the beginning of the microprocessor era.

Let's just say it would be hard to make a modern CPU with discrete transistors. Or vacuum tubes. Or relays.

For the mere mortals in the crowd, it all started here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CK722