TABLE OF CONTENTS Modern semiconductor electronics was revolutionized by the invention of the bipolar transistor at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1948. The impact of transistors can be best understood when one realizes that, without them, there would have been no progress in such diverse areas of everyday life as computers, television, telecommunications, the Internet, air travel, space exploration, as well as the tools necessary to study and understand the biological process.
Transistors can be classified in two major categories; they can be either bipolar transistors or field effect transistors. Each is fundamentally different from the other in its operation mechanisms. A bipolar transistor operates through the injection and collection of minority carriers utilizing p-n junctions. By contrast, a field effect transistor is a majority carrier device and is thus a unipolar device.
In this Chapter, we will first review the general motivation and principles for electrical amplification and switching. We will then describe qualitative and quantitatively the direct-current (DC) operation mechanisms of bipolar junction transistors (BJT), their modes of operation, second order effects, as well as practical applications of BJTs in amplifier configurations. A variation of the bipolar transistor, utilizing a heterojunction, will subsequently be discussed. Next, the DC operating principles of field effect transistors (FET) will be presented along with corresponding second order behaviors of FFT-based devices. Once again, practical circuit configurations and applications will be introduced. Finally, application specific transistors will be presented, including single electron as well as high electron mobility transistors.
