A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power. Transistors are one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semiconductor material usually with at least 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.
The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor, also known as the metal–oxide–silicon transistor, is a type of insulated-gate field-effect transistor that is fabricated by the controlled oxidation of a semiconductor, typically silicon. The voltage of the covered gate determines the electrical conductivity of the device; this ability to change conductivity with the amount of applied voltage can be used for amplifying or switching electronic signals.
Flash memory is an electronic non-volatile computer memory storage medium that can be electrically erased and reprogrammed. The two main types of flash memory, NOR flash and NAND flash, are named for the NOR and NAND logic gates.
Consumer electronics or home electronics are electronic equipment intended for everyday use, typically in private homes. Consumer electronics include devices used for entertainment, communications and recreation. Usually referred to as black goods due to many products being housed in black or dark casings. This term is used to distinguish them from "white goods" which are meant for housekeeping tasks, such as washing machines and refrigerators, although nowadays, these would be considered black goods, some of these being connected to the Internet. In British English, they are often called brown goods by producers and sellers. In the 2010s, this distinction is absent in large big box consumer electronics stores, which sell both entertainment, communication, and home office devices and kitchen appliances such as refrigerators. Radio broadcasting in the early 20th century brought the first major consumer product, the broadcast receiver. Later products included telephones, televisions, and calculators, then audio and video recorders and players, game consoles, personal computers and MP3 players. In the 2010s, consumer electronics stores often sell GPS, automotive electronics, video game consoles, electronic musical instruments, karaoke machines, digital cameras, and video players. Stores also sell smart appliances, digital cameras, camcorders, cell phones, and smartphones. Some of the newer products sold include virtual reality head-mounted display goggles, smart home devices that connect home devices to the Internet and wearable technology.
Renesas Electronics Corporation is a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, initially incorporated in 2002 as Renesas Technology, the consolidated entity of the semiconductor units of Hitachi and Mitsubishi excluding their dynamic random-access memory businesses, to which NEC Electronics merged in 2010, resulting in a minor change in the corporate name and logo to as it is now.
Infineon Technologies AG is a German semiconductor manufacturer founded in 1999, when the semiconductor operations of the former parent company Siemens AG were spun off. Infineon has about 46,665 employees and is one of the ten largest semiconductor manufacturers worldwide. It is market leader in automotive and power semiconductors. In fiscal year 2020, the company achieved sales of €8.6 billion. Infineon bought Cypress in April 2020.
The semiconductor industry is the aggregate of companies engaged in the design and fabrication of semiconductors and semiconductor devices, such as integrated circuits. It formed around 1960, once the fabrication of semiconductor devices became a viable business. The industry's annual semiconductor sales revenue has since grown to over $481 billion, as of 2018. The semiconductor industry is in turn the driving force behind the wider electronics industry, with annual power electronics sales of £135 billion as of 2011, annual consumer electronics sales expected to reach $2.9 trillion by 2020, tech industry sales expected to reach $5 trillion in 2019, and e-commerce with over $29 trillion in 2017.
The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device. It typically refers to the number of MOSFETs on an integrated circuit (IC) chip, as all modern ICs use MOSFETs. It is the most common measure of IC complexity. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observed that the transistor count doubles approximately every two years.
The electronics industry emerged in the 20th century and is today one of the largest global industries. Contemporary society uses a vast array of electronic devices built in automated or semi-automated factories operated by the industry. Products are primarily assembled from metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistors and integrated circuits, the latter principally by photolithography and often on printed circuit boards.
ON Semiconductor is a semiconductor supplier company, formerly in the Fortune 500, but dropping into the Fortune 1000 in 2020. Products include power and signal management, logic, discrete, and custom devices for automotive, communications, computing, consumer, industrial, LED lighting, medical, military/aerospace and power applications. ON Semiconductor runs a network of manufacturing facilities, sales offices and design centers in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific regions. Headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, ON Semiconductor has revenues of $3.907 billion (2016), which puts it among the worldwide top 20 semiconductor sales leaders.
Random-access memory is a form of computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory, in contrast with other direct-access data storage media, where the time required to read and write data items varies significantly depending on their physical locations on the recording medium, due to mechanical limitations such as media rotation speeds and arm movement.
Dialog Semiconductor PLC is an American founded UK-Domiciled manufacturer of semiconductor based system solutions. The company is headquartered in the United Kingdom in Reading, with a global sales, R&D and marketing organization. Dialog creates highly integrated application-specific standard product (ASSP) and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs), optimised for smartphones, computing, Internet of Things devices, LED solid-state lighting (SSL), and smart home applications.
Exynos, formerly Hummingbird (Korean: 엑시노스), is a series of ARM-based system-on-chips developed by Samsung Electronics' System LSI division and manufactured by Samsung Foundry. It is a continuation of Samsung's earlier S3C, S5L and S5P line of SoCs.
The IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is an annual micro- and nanoelectronics conference held each December that serves as a forum for reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and related device technologies, design, manufacturing, physics, modeling and circuit-device interaction.
Josef Lutz is a German physicist and electrical engineer.
The Task Force on Rebooting Computing (TFRC), housed within IEEE Computer Society, is the new home for the IEEE Rebooting Computing Initiative. Founded in 2013 by the IEEE Future Directions Committee, Rebooting Computing has provided an international, interdisciplinary environment where experts from a wide variety of computer-related fields can come together to explore novel approaches to future computing. IEEE Rebooting Computing began as a global initiative launched by IEEE that proposes to rethink the concept of computing through a holistic look at all aspects of computing, from the device itself to the user interface. As part of its work, IEEE Rebooting Computing provides access to various resources like conferences and educational events, feature and scholarly articles, reports, and videos.
In semiconductor manufacturing, the 3 nm process is the next die shrink after the 5-nanometre MOSFET technology node. As of 2019, TSMC and Samsung have announced plans to put a 3 nm semiconductor node into commercial production for 2022 with Samsung delaying it to 2024 due to yield issues, followed by Intel for 2023. Samsung's 3 nm process is based on GAAFET technology, a type of multi-gate MOSFET technology, while TSMC's 3nm process will still use FinFET technology, despite TSMC developing GAAFET transistors. Specifically, Samsung plans to use its own variant of GAAFET called MBCFET.
Andre August Jaecklin is a Swiss electrical engineer and was a university teacher. He made contributions in different fields of electronics starting with telecommunications, followed by data storage while in California and notably semiconductor devices for power applications. In particular, he is a pioneer of optically-fired thyristors in the field of power electronics.
Chen Xingbi was a Chinese electronics engineer and professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Known for his invention of superjunction power semiconductor devices, he was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He was inducted into IEEE's ISPSD Hall of Fame in 2019.
