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Auto-Sembly System
Two exciting developments just coming into use make Signal Corps engineers feel they are on the threshold of real “Miniaturization, Ruggedization and Reliability.” One of these is the revolutionary little gadget called the “transistor”; the other is the process known - again in discouragingly obscure military-scientific language - as the “Auto-Sembly System of Circuit Fabrication for Sub-Miniature Electronic Equipment.”The transistor promises to become to electronics what penicillin and other wonder drugs have been to medicine. It is a device which utilizes an infinitesimal speck of a chemical element known as germanium to do the work of the larger, heat-producing, power-consuming vacuum tube in radio, television, radar and other electronic devices. Germanium, incidentally, is in good supply in this country as a by-product of zinc mining.
SCEL itself says principal credit for transistor development belongs to Bell Telephone Laboratories, whose engineers and physicists were pioneers in the field. However, research contributions leading to development of transistors -- or, as scientists term it, the field of “semiconductors” -- were made by several groups. The new development still is in its infancy, and authorities caution that transistors will not yet do all the work of vacuum tubes. However, even on the basis of present development, SCEL experts believe transistors could replace 25 per cent of the 650,000,000 vacuum tubes produced annually in the United States, and, for the future, some scientists predict it is possible for the new development to replace tubes “almost entirely.”
- Page updated January 1, 2004
page created August 29, 1999
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