Shortly after his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain invented their point-contact device, Bell Labs physicist William B. Shockley recognized that these rectifying characteristics might also be used in making a junction transistor. In a 1949 paper Shockley explained the physical principles behind the operation of these junctions and showed how to use them in a three-layer—n-p-n or p-n-p—device that could act as a solid-state amplifier or switch. Electric current would flow from one end to the other, with the voltage applied to the inner layer governing how much current rushed by at any given moment. In the n-p-n junction transistor, for example, electrons would flow from one n-layer through the inner p-layer to the other n-layer. Thus, a weak electrical signal applied to the inner, base layer would modulate the current flowing through the entire device. For this current to flow, some of the electrons would have to survive briefly in the presence of holes; in order to reach the second n-layer, they could not all combine with holes in the p-layer. Such bipolar operation was not at all obvious when Shockley first conceived his junction transistor. Experiments with increasingly pure crystals of silicon and germanium showed that it indeed occurred, making bipolar junction transistors possible.

To achieve bipolar operation, it also helps that the base layer be narrow, so that electrons (in n-p-n transistors) and holes (in p-n-p) do not have to travel very far in the presence of their opposite numbers. Narrow base layers also promote high-frequency operation of junction transistors: the narrower the base, the higher the operating frequency. That is a major reason why there was so much interest in developing diffused-base transistors during the 1950s, as described in the section Silicon transistors. Their microns-thick bases permitted transistors to operate above 100 megahertz (100 million cycles per second) for the first time.

MOS-type transistors

A similar principle applies to metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistors, but here it is the distance between source and drain that largely determines the operating frequency. In an n-channel MOS (NMOS) transistor, for example, the source and the drain are two n-type regions that have been established in a piece of p-type semiconductor, usually silicon. Except for the two points at which metal leads contact these regions, the entire semiconductor surface is covered by an insulating oxide layer. The metal gate, usually aluminum, is deposited atop the oxide layer just above the gap between source and drain. If there is no voltage (or a negative voltage) upon the gate, the semiconductor material beneath it will contain excess holes, and very few electrons will be able to cross the gap, because one of the two p-n junctions will block their path. Therefore, no current will flow in this configuration—other than unavoidable leakage currents. If the gate voltage is instead positive, an electric field will penetrate through the oxide layer and attract electrons into the silicon layer (often called the inversion layer) directly beneath the gate. Once this voltage exceeds a specific threshold value, electrons will begin flowing easily between source and drain. The transistor turns on.

Analogous behaviour occurs in a p-channel MOS transistor, in which the source and the drain are p-type regions formed in n-type semiconductor material. Here a negative voltage above a threshold induces a layer of holes (instead of electrons) beneath the gate and permits a current of them to flow from source to drain. For both n-channel and p-channel MOS (also called NMOS and PMOS) transistors, the operating frequency is largely governed by the speed at which the electrons or holes can drift through the semiconductor material divided by the distance from source to drain. Because electrons have mobilities through silicon that are about three times higher than holes, NMOS transistors can operate at substantially higher frequencies than PMOS transistors. Small separations between source and drain also promote high-frequency operation, and extensive efforts have been devoted to reducing this distance.

In the 1960s Frank Wanlass of Fairchild Semiconductor recognized that combinations of an NMOS and a PMOS transistor would draw extremely little current in standby operation—just the tiny, unavoidable leakage currents. These CMOS, or complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, transistor circuits consume significant power only when the gate voltage exceeds some threshold and a current flows from source to drain. Thus, they can serve as very low-power devices, often a million times lower than the equivalent bipolar junction transistors. Together with their inherent simplicity of fabrication, this feature of CMOS transistors has made them the natural choice for manufacturing microchips, which today cram millions of transistors into a surface area smaller than a fingernail. In such cases the waste heat generated by the component’s power consumption must be kept to an absolute minimum, or the chips will simply melt.

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Field-effect transistors

Another kind of unipolar transistor, called the metal-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MESFET), is particularly well suited for microwave and other high-frequency applications because it can be manufactured from semiconductor materials with high electron mobilities that do not support an insulating oxide surface layer. These include compound semiconductors such as germanium-silicon and gallium arsenide. A MESFET is built much like a MOS transistor but with no oxide layer between the gate and the underlying conduction channel. Instead, the gate makes a direct, rectifying contact with the channel, which is generally a thin layer of n-type semiconductor supported underneath by an insulating substrate. A negative voltage on the gate induces a depletion layer just beneath it that restricts the flow of electrons between source and drain. The device acts like a voltage-controlled resistor; if the gate voltage is large enough, it can block this flow almost completely. By contrast, a positive voltage on the gate encourages electrons to traverse the channel.

To improve MESFET performance even further, advanced devices known as heterojunction field-effect transistors have been developed, in which p-n junctions are established between two slightly dissimilar semiconductor materials, such as gallium arsenide and aluminum gallium arsenide. By properly controlling the impurities in the two substances, a high-conductivity channel can be formed at their interface, promoting the flow of electrons through it. If one semiconductor is a high-purity material, its electron mobility can be large, resulting in a high operating frequency for this kind of transistor. (The electron mobility of gallium arsenide, for example, is five times that of silicon.) Heterojunction MESFETs are increasingly used for microwave applications such as cellular telephone systems.