Just saw on r/todayIlearned that the MOS transistor (or MOSFET) is the most produced piece of technology ever. I then looked it up on Wikipedia to try and understand what it is/does and I’m still totally lost. ELI5?
In: Technology
A MOSFET is a specific type of transistor. It’s an amplifier, although used in a certain way it can be thought of like a digital switch. It has 3 main terminals: A Source, a Drain, and a Gate. The current that passes between the Source and Drain is controlled by the Gate voltage.
Since a small Gate voltage can control a large current between Source and Drain, the MOSFET can amplify signals. If the only signals the Gate ever gets are small or large, then the transistor is being used like a digital switch. You can use the output of one to control the inputs of others, and they can control others, and so on and so forth. This allows us to create circuits that contain a bunch of simple devices (MOSFETs mostly) but build them up into things that can perform complex logical functions. Like a microprocessor.
The reason that it is the most produced piece of technology is that we’ve learned over the last half century or so to put many MOSFETs onto a single “chip”, creating an Integrated Circuit. And by making them smaller and smaller, we’ve gone from putting just a handful onto one chip to literally putting billions on a chip. A single semiconductor wafer with many ICs on it can have hundreds of billions of transistors, or even over a trillion. When you make that many of something at one time, you end up with an awful lot of them.
Latest Answers