The spacistor{{cite book , last = Wolf , first = Oswald , author2=R. T. Kramer , author3=J. Spiech , author4=H. Shleuder , title = Special Purpose Transistors: A Self-Instructional Programmed Manual , publisher =

Prentice Hall Prentice Hall was a major American publishing#Textbook_publishing, educational publisher. It published print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. It was an independent company throughout the bulk of the twentieth cen ...

, year = 1966 , pages = 103–117 was a type of

transistor A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch electrical signals and electric power, power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics. It is composed of semicondu ...

developed in the 1950s as an improvement over the

point-contact transistor The point-contact transistor was the first type of transistor to be successfully demonstrated. It was developed by research scientists John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at Bell Laboratories in December 1947. They worked in a group led by phys ...

and the later alloy junction transistor. It offered much higher speed than earlier transistors. It became obsolete in the early 1960s with the development of the diffusion transistor. It is composed of a P-N junction with a wide

depletion region In semiconductor physics, the depletion region, also called depletion layer, depletion zone, junction region, space charge region, or space charge layer, is an insulating region within a conductive, doped semiconductor material where the mobil ...

, inside which two additional contacts are made: the ''injector'' and the ''modulator''. The P material was called the ''base'' and the N material was called the ''collector''. The ''injector'' acted like a BJT (

bipolar junction transistor A bipolar junction transistor (BJT) is a type of transistor that uses both electrons and electron holes as charge carriers. In contrast, a unipolar transistor, such as a field-effect transistor (FET), uses only one kind of charge carrier. A ...

) emitter, the ''modulator'' like a base, and the ''collector'' like its BJT namesake. It achieved high speed by reducing the

charge carrier In solid state physics, a charge carrier is a particle or quasiparticle that is free to move, carrying an electric charge, especially the particles that carry electric charges in electrical conductors. Examples are electrons, ions and holes. ...

's transit time.

References

External links

The Spacistor, A New Class of High-Frequency Semiconductor Devices
March 1957 - prone to oscillation
The Spacistor
July 1961 - operate to 25 Mc (MHz) Transistor types