"If you succeed, you'll be a hero. if you fail, so what? You'll just go to work on a different project."
Tom Stanley "motivating" the MOSFET team
Some words, such as laser and radar, are so common that most of us are unaware of their humble origins as acronyms. Others, despite being worthy of recognition, have not made the leap to public fame; the MOSFET is definitely within this category.
A MOSFET (metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor) has no moving parts. We can roughly understand its form and function by thinking of a sandwich composed of three types of material, generally referred to by the letters N P N. If wires are connected to the two N components of our sandwich, the current does not flow. This is due to the different electrical properties of the P layer.
How do we get the current to flow? Strangely we first have to coat one side of the P layer with an insulating nonconductive material and then place a plate of metal on top of this insulator. This still does not permit a current, but when the metal plate (called a "gate") has a voltage applied to it, an electric field is generated through the nonconductive material and into the underlying P layer. The electric field will repel positive charges in the P layer, causing them to move away. This creates a "channel" in the P layer that allows conduction between the two N layers in the NPN sandwich. The current flows.
The MOSFET may be small and sound insignificant but it was built for great things. It could act as a switch or amplifier, it proved suitable for miniaturization, it had low heat properties, and it was cheap to produce. Basically, it had all the properties needed to make it a standard component of the integrated circuits used in the modern computer.
