Semiconductor Devices and Circuits
B. R. Bannister, Donald G. Whitehead · 1987
No matter how carefully a digital system is designed, satisfactory operation depends very heavily on the reliability of the circuits and components used — the hardware . Ideas originating in the latter part of the nineteenth century with Charles Babbage (see Babbage, 1961) are still used today, but his ‘computing engines’ were never fully operative because the technology of the time was unable to meet the challenge of the close tolerances needed in his machinery. In fact the modern digital computer, which made its appearance in the last few years of the 1940s, would have been an impossible venture only ten years earlier, owing its development to the impetus given to electronics by the Second World War (Metropolis, 1980). The invention of the transistor in 1948, and the rapid development of other semiconductor devices, with their inherent reliability and cheapness, led to the present-day emphasis on digital techniques, almost invariably using solid-state circuits, with their dependence on diode and transistor action.