"A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power. It is composed of semiconductor material usually with at least ...
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three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor´s terminals controls the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be higher than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Today, some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.
Austro-Hungarian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld proposed the concept of a field-effect transistor in 1926, but it was not possible to actually construct a working device at that time. The first working device to be built was a point-contact transistor invented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs. The three shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement. The most widely used transistor is the MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor), also known as the MOS transistor, which was invented by Mohamed Atalla with Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. The MOSFET was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses." - (en.wikipedia.org 06.01.2021)
