Discuss what a transistor is, how it is used, what it is made of, and how it works.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The elementary building block for all modern computer systems, the transistor, is much like a light switch. It can be in an OFF state, which does not allow electricity to flow, or in an ON state, in which electricity can pass unimpeded. However, unlike the light switch, a transistor is a solid-state device that has no mechanical or moving parts. The switching of a transistor from the OFF to the ON state, and vice versa, is done electronically rather than mechanically. This allows the transistor to be fast as well as extremely small. A typical transistor can switch states in a billionth of a second, and at current technology levels, 1 billion transistors can fit into a space only 1 cm2. Furthermore, hardware technology is changing so rapidly that both these numbers might be out of date soon.Transistors are constructed from special materials called semiconductors, such as silicon and gallium arsenide. A large number of transistors, as well as the electrical conducting paths that connect them, can be printed photographically on a wafer of silicon to produce a device known as an integrated circuit or, more commonly, a chip. The chip is mounted on a circuit board, which interconnects all the different chips (e.g., memory, processor, and communications) needed to run a computer system. This circuit board is then plugged into the computer using a set of connectors located on the end of the board. The use of photographic rather than mechanical production techniques has numerous advantages. Because light can be focused very sharply, these integrated circuits can be manufactured in very high densities-high numbers of transistors per square centimeter-and with a very high degree of accuracy. The more transistors that can be packed into a fixed amount of space, the greater the processing power of the computer and the greater the amount of information that can be stored in memory.?