Home : Math Matters - A Brief Look at How Mathematics has Influenced Modern Life : Electronics

--- Make Selection --- Electrification Highways Electronics Water Supply & Distribution Household Appliances Petroleum & Petrochemicals Airplanes Spacecraft High Performance Materials Air Conditioning & Refrigeration Nuclear Technology Radio & TV Computers Imaging Telephone The Internet Health Technologies Agricultural Mechanization Laser & Fiber Optics Automobiles    Electronics Antoine Lavoisier (French, 1743-1794) who is considered the father of modern chemistry, discovered the element silicon. Silicon is the main component in semiconconductor devices. Lavoisier also introduced the Metric system of measurement. The invention of the transistor in 1947 at Bell Labs launched the electronics age. This small, three-terminal device allows current to flow between two of its terminals depending on the current or voltage applied on the third. It can be used for amplification, switching, modulation, and many other tasks that had only been possible by large, less robust vacuum tubes or mechanical relay switches. Over time, transistors became further miniaturized within integrated circuits (chips). Sample mathematics of a Bipolar Junction Transistor (Ebers-Moll model): Emitter current     Collector current     Base-internal current     Where: is the common base forward short circuit current gain (0.98 to 0.998) is the reverse saturation current of the base-emitter diode (on the order of 10-15 to 10-12 amperes) is the thermal voltage (approximately 26 mV at room temperature ≈ 300 K) is the base-emitter voltage is the base width