Comments by "Paul Frederick" (@1pcfred) on "The Most Important Invention of the 20th Century: Transistors" video.

  1. To his credit Shockley did later come up with the planar transistor design. Which was the commercially successful design. Today almost all transistors are FETs too.
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  2.  @scottfranco1962  Moore himself said his observation could not go on indefinitely due to physical limitations. State changes are what cause heat in the transistors used in integrated circuits. The faster you switch them the more heat is generated. There's just more heat generating transitions going on. The time when a semiconductor is a poor conductor. Passing current through a resistance generates heat. The industry tried several ploys to mitigate that heat. Shrinking the parts and reducing the operating voltages. But there's only so much you can do.
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  3. Shockley himself wasn't as critical to the initial discovery as you've been lead to believe. He'd personally abandoned the project months before the breakthrough occurred. Having nothing better to do Brattain and Bardeen kept working on it though. Then when they were successful Shockley showed up again to share in the credit. Funny how those kinds of things work. The picture you saw in this video is a complete fabrication too. Shockley never looked through a microscope in his life! He was a theorist.
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  4. Actually Moore's Law has kept pace. You have to look at the very highest end parts. Which ain't going into desktop PCs. Things you can't afford!
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  5. Yeah the nanometer wars. TSMC with their "7 nm" and Intel with their denser "10 nm".
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  6. I'd sooner take sea shells than that Ponzi cryptocurrency scheme.
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  7. According to Moore his was merely an observation. At the time he was one of the most involved people on the planet when it came to integrated circuit production. So he knew a bit about the topic. I don't think he even said transistors. I think he said features. He also said the price halves too. Someone needs to get ahold of Nvidia about their pricing.
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  8. No it really wasn't. It was made by hard human sweat and tears. People that don't understand any of this could believe we found it in a flying saucer though.
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  9.  @nferraro222  yeah but Marconi figured out a way to use those patents in a practical manner. Which is something Tesla failed to do.
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  10.  @davidbono9359  Noyce invented the first monolithic integrated circuit. What Kirby made we'd more think of as a thick film hybrid device today. But we use Noyce's tech to make chips now. You can argue the same thing about the transistor because that kludge they made at the Labs in 47 is nothing like anything that was commercially produced.
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  11.  @scottfranco1962  sure I did. You're just wrong.
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  12.  @thegeneralist7527  I am not sure how accurate your information is. We are incapable of fully testing CPUs today within a reasonable time frame. I'm not talking about minutes here either. More like hundreds or even thousands of years. So we could not detect these flaws that you say we sort for. Chips are binned based purely on superficial performance. Since the discovery of the classic Pentium flaws all chips have had programmable areas added to them to work around design flaws too. As we are also incapable of even testing all theoretical states a chip may be in within any time frame we can handle. When the complexity is too great the problem becomes too large to tackle. Tens of billions of transistors arranged in logic arrays is simply beyond us. 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 is a very large number. That's just the possibilities in one 64 bit register. Then factor in the total number of registers and the number of possible states is astronomical. It just cannot all be checked.
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  13.  @thegeneralist7527  storage is not a good analogy when it comes to logic. One switch is out the whole array is shot. You cannot just route a new one in.
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  14.  @thegeneralist7527  WTG IBM. Intel should ask them for some pointers.
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  15. No it's thanks to my neighbors. Brattain and Bardeen both lived in my home town when they developed the transistor. They were as human as anyone else is too.
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  16.  @tooterturtle7849  I don't need to ask anyone anything. The path of progress is clear.
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  17. Moore's Law has not broken down yet. Though we may see it happen in the next few shrinks. There's road maps to 3 nm and beyond. It has also always been hard to achieve new nodes. I guess hindsight makes things seem easier? AMD bowed out of production at the 40 nm node though. Because then that was hard.
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  18.  @davidtuttle4648  AMD hasn't made a chip since 2008. They get other fab plants to make chips for them today. TSMC primarily.
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  19.  @davidtuttle4648  Intel's 10 nm is also denser than TSMC's 7 nm. Maybe numbers don't mean what people think they do?
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  20. Doubling of features on a die. He did not specify what those features were. Many say transistors. In chips transistors are sometimes used as resistors too.
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  21.  @pa1wbu  the 4004 was based on Noyce's monolithic tech. Wasn't the first integrated circuit by a long shot either.
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  22. I grew up next door to the Labs so I know this. Brattain and Bardeen both lived in my home town while they worked on the transistor project. Shockley lived in Manhattan. Shockley had also abandoned the project before the breakthrough occurred too. But he horned in on the success anyways. The picture shown here of the three of them was staged. Was a bit of a sticking point among the group.
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  23. I always liked Shockley's endorsement of eugenics myself. They put that on the bronze plaque? heh
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  24. Robert Noyce invented the monolithic integrated circuit. Then he founded Intel.
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  25.  @miked4943  Sherman Fairchild?
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  26. Growing up next door to Bell Labs I was dumbfounded when he said it was in Manhattan. You had to come to my town to see Manhattan. You couldn't see it from the Labs. The mountain I grew up on was in the way.
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  27. Someone needs to break the code of their last names.
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  28. A DRAM bit is a transistor and a capacitor. The capacitor is really the part that holds the data. It don't hold it for very long either.
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  29. The origins of precision come from comprehending logic. Like the rule of three. If you take three surfaces and lap them against each other each will end up flat. There is no combination of convex and concave that works among three surfaces. So they all must be flat. With a flat surface you have a precision reference plate. Three of them really.
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  30. Africa had the world's first nuclear reactor. the French mining Uranium were quite surprised to discover it.
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  31. Kirby slapped a bunch of parts onto substrate material. Robert Noyce invented the monolithic integrated circuit. The technology we use to this day.
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  32. In electronics there's only two genders!
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  33. because Tesla had nothing to do with it?
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  34. Yeah but don't believe that Bell Labs was in Manhattan. I grew up next door to the Labs and this ain't Manhattan https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Lucent_HQ.gif
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  35. Are you sure Bell Labs is in Manhattan? Because I've worked on the campus and it's in Murray Hill. Which ain't exactly Manhattan, let me tell you. I think Shockley himself was residing in Manhattan? He also wasn't involved with the project personally by the time the breakthrough occurred either. Bratton and Bardeen were both living in my home town when they were. Shockley did later invent the planer transistor which is more similar to the bipolar transistors we use today. Not that we use many bipolar transistors today. But the original point contact transistors fell out of use long ago. BTW the picture you showed of all three of them was totally staged. All of that is history that should be remembered.
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  36.  @Moletrouser  everyone working at Shockley Semiconductor was doing what Shockley told them they should do. Shockley would have done it himself but he was a theorist, not an experimenter. The man probably would have sat upside down on a lab stool if he tried. That's not what he did. Some people are simply too intelligent to perform any practical tasks. Shockley was a first order genius too. When you're that smart it is a severely debilitating mental handicap.
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  37. I don't know if Gordy limited it into a finite area. He knew that just getting more parts on any die is more difficult to do. He actually made chips so he was intimately familiar with all of the challenges personally.
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  38. Transistors work on the principal that opposite charges attract and like charges repel. They're like electronic valves. You arrange regions in such a way that current doesn't like to flow unless a control current is present. Like a sandwich. You make them either NPN or PNP. Then you screw with the charge of the middle layer to let current flow through the whole stack. Herding electron cats. We put tiny people inside chips with laser pointers. Yes that's how it works!
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  39. Did Moore even say transistors or was he more generic in his phrasing just using the term, "features"? Moore was a practical man involved with the physical attributes of semiconductors. So he viewed it differently than others do. Gordy actually had to make the little buggers. He was a chemist.
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