User:Armand Van Dormael

Sony Reinvented the Transistor

In 1953, when Akio Morita signed a license agreement with Western Electric, he mentioned that he intended to use transistors in radio receivers. He was told that the amplifying capacity of the transistor was sufficient only for hearing aids. In Made in Japan. (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1994) he wrote:

l must make it clear that the transistor being made at that time wasn't something that we could license and produce and use right off the shelf. This miraculous device was a breakthrough in electronic technology, but it could only handle audio frequencies. In fact, when 1 finally signed the patent agreement a year later, the people at Western Electric told me that if we wanted to use the transistor in consumer items, the hearing aid was the only product we should expect to make with it. In those days there were no transistors made for use in radios. Of course, we were not interested in the hearing aid market, which is very limited. We wanted to make something that could be used by everybody, and we had plans to put our research scientists and technicians to work developing our own high-frequency transistor for use in radios. (p.67)

For three years, a group of about 30 engineers studied the properties of germanium and silicon. They upgraded the technology so that it enabled them to deliver sufficient high frequency to power a battery-operated radio. In August 1955, their first pocket size transistor set - the TR-55 -was produced in small quantities and only for internal consumption. The TR-63 was launched in March 1957 and established Sony as a pioneer and world leader in consumer electronics.

It was very complicated work and our project team went through a long period of painstaking trial and error, using new, or at least different, materials to get the increased frequency we needed. They had to rebuild and virtually reinvent the transistor. (p.71)

A year later we surprised the Bell Labs people who had invented the transistor by reporting how we made transistors by phosphorous doping, something that had been tried and discarded, obviously prematurely, by them. And it was also during our transistor research and particularly the heavy use of phosphorous that our researcher, physicist Leo Esaki, and our staff discovered and described the diode tunneling effect, how subatomic particles can move in waves through a seemingly impenetrable barrier. Esaki was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in 1973. (p.72)