Transistors may have been useful to the phone ... Tsushin Kogyo was close to manufacturing its first radios when it heard that an American company had beaten them to the punch.

The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.

The idea of an optical transistor — and the associated optical logic circuits that may follow — conjures images of light controlling light in some sparkling, transparent computer. This dream ...

Nanoscale 3D transistors made from ultrathin semiconductor materials can operate more efficiently than silicon-based devices, leveraging quantum mechanical properties to potentially enable ultra ...

Why it matters: Silicon transistors are great, but just like any other object in the physical world, they are held back by a few limitations. The laws of physics put a bottleneck on performance ...