The transistor acts like an insulator or a switch that is turned off. When a positive voltage is applied to the base, electrons are pulled out of the junctions and they no longer act as barriers.

Electricity can race through. The transistor base (the "meat" of the sandwich) acts like the handle on a faucet. Turn it one way and current will gush through like water through a hose.

A slight surprise comes in how point contact transistors are used, unlike today’s devices their gain in common emitter mode was so poor that they took instead a common base configuration.

Speaking of the Pinecil, it uses an unorthodox driving circuit – it has an NPN transistor, but its base driven through a capacitor, so that only the AC component of the driving signal gets through.

Also called a "bipolar junction transistor" (BJT), it is one of two major transistor categories; the other is "field-effect transistor" (FET). Although the first transistor was bipolar and the ...

A landmark development led by researchers from the University of Glasgow could help create a new generation of diamond-based ...