“Unlocking the Future: How a Simple Discovery Revolutionized Technology and Changed Our Lives Forever”
After much experimentation, Walter Brattain determined that the failure of Shockley’s design was due to a buildup of electrons on the surface of the silicon blocking the gate’s electric field. At the suggestion of Robert Gibnet, he and Bardeen tried getting around this problem by dunking the prototype in distilled water, filling in the air gap between the gate and the silicon and enhancing the strength of the electric field. Incredibly, this actually worked – though nowhere near as efficiently as the team had hoped. As Shockley later noted:
“This new finding was electrifying…at long last, Brattain and Gibney had overcome the blocking effect.”
Replacing the water with a chemical called glycol borate produced better results, but the device still had a slow response time and could not handle high frequencies – a key requirement for use in radio and radar equipment. Eventually, the team abandoned silicon as the substrate and focused instead on germanium, whose manufacture had already been perfected for use in diodes. But this material exhibited the same barrier effect as silicon, and though the team tried countless remedies like freezing the germanium with liquid nitrogen, full-scale amplification still continued to elude them.
It was at this point that a pair of serendipitous accidents nudged the team in the right direction. For their newest prototype, Brattain grew a thin layer of oxide on the surface of the germanium crystal and deposited an even thinner layer of gold onto this, hoping that the oxide would insulate the gold from the germanium. At first this seemed to work, but Brattain soon realized that the oxide layer had actually been washed away, meaning the gold was in direct contact with the germanium. This indicated that the device was not operating according to the field effect as Shockley had predicted, but some other, still unknown phenomenon.
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