The transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical power. The transistor has played a major part in the creation and advancement of today's electronic devices such as radios, calculators, and most of all computers. Computers used to be very large expense of machines, only owned by companies for calculating purposes, and ran off Vacuum tubes which were commonly too noisy and got to hot. With the invention of transistors developers were able to make the computer smaller and less expensive so that they were able to be sold to the public.
With the invention of the transistor developers were able to create the first personal computer. The transistor also helped to create the integrated circuit or microchip. An integrated circuit is a set of electrical circuits on one plate or chip. The microchip really revolutionized the computer. Cost is low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit by photo-lithography rather than being constructed one transistor at a time, therefore the prouduction cost is cheaper and can be sold at a cheaper price. The microchip improved the proformacne of the computer aslo because the the small size and closeness of the components allowed components switch quickly and consume little power .
The microchip's quality is often classfied by the number of transistors they contain. The growth of the number of transistors that can be put on a single microchip has grown rapidly. In 1971 Intel. Put out there first microchip, the 4004, that contained 2,500 transistors. Three years later they put out the 8080 which double the number of transistors with 4,500. Intel's co-founder Gordon E. Moore notice that the doubling of transistors in new microchips was becoming a trend and came up with moore's law! Moore's law states