|
|
Oral History – Jerry Suran (Continued)
|
|
At that time the field had
pretty well switched from point contact to junction transistors and GE was
at the forefront, and maybe a close second to Bell Telephone Laboratories
in the development of junction devices.
Part of my job was to understand the performance and
characteristics, if not the physics, of transistors. As a matter of fact, the first article I
wrote when I was at GE Electronics Laboratory was received in 1953 by the
Journal of Applied Physics. It was entitled “The Effect of a Transverse
Electric Field on Carrier Diffusion in the Base Region of a Transistor”.
As a result of this theoretical
work on field effects in the base region of transistors, I became
interested in the possibility of building a transistor tetrode - taking a
cue from simulating the vacuum tube tetrodes, and wondering what would
happen if one were to apply a field across the base. The thing that crossed
my mind at that time was that maybe we could reduce surface recombination
and increase the gain of a transistor. And, if it were at all possible to
get the field to act transversely, we could even increase the diffusion
speed across the base and improve the gain-bandwidth product by that dual
effect.
At the time you were doing
this work, you were using junction transistors?
We were using junction
transistors, and at that time, all of the work was in germanium. These (devices) were being built in John
Saby’s lab in the Electronics Laboratory.
|
|
|
Oral History – Jerry Suran (Continued)
|
|
That group was just upstairs in the same building. We were the
circuits group, under Shea, and Arnie Lesk was in that group, reporting to
John Saby. He was the one I was working with and I
asked him if he could maybe build some tetrodes for us to experiment
with. Just try to put two ohmic
contacts across the base of a transistor, and try to build the transistor
just the way he would normally build a triode. We were just curious to see how these things would work.
I believe that this particular
experiment was run about a year after I came to the Electronics Laboratory,
so it was probably about the middle of 1953, or maybe a little bit later in
that year. What happened was that the first couple of tetrodes that we got
we could notice very little effect of the electric field. Our theory just wasn’t born out, that
this fourth electrode was going to do anything at all. On the other hand, one of those tetrodes
curiously had a hysteresis effect on the input, and when we put an
oscilloscope on it we found that the thing was oscillating. There was no effect of input voltage or
current on the output, so it became apparent quickly that something had
happened to the collector contact and that this one had a broken lead.
Go
To Suran Oral History, Page 3
|
|