What is a transistor used for in a circuit?

Answer 1

Transistors are the fundamental building blocks of a computer, just as cells are the buildin blocks of any living organism. It is rare to find any individual transistors in a modern computer but every integrated circuit contains vast number of them. For example, every memory location will have a pair of trasistors, so there are 16 of them for each byte, so 16 million of them for each megabyte of memory. The central processor which carries out all the calculations and other processes also contains millions of transistors. As integrated circuits are developed, the size of each transistor gets smaller, so more can be packed into single chips but they are still doing the same job as the individual transistors that were used to build the very first solid state computers. To learn more about the way transistors operate in a computer, it is worth looking the way they are used to make simple logic gates. The basic gates such as OR, NOR, AND, NAND and various latches are used to create the powerful computers we take for granted today. A study of these gates will offer some insight into the way computers store, move and manipulate data using transistor technology.

Answer 2

Intel 4004, introduced in 1971 had a total of 2300 transistors.

Pentium I, introduced in 1993 had a total of 3.1 million transistors.

Pentium 4, introduced in 2000 had a total of 42 million transistors.

AMD K10 (Rana / Phenom), introduced in 2008, had 758 million transistors.

Six-Core Sandy Bridge i7, introduced in 2011, had a total of 2.27 BILLION transistors.

Anything from a couple thousand to a couple billion, cool isn't it?

Answer 3

Transistors perform the functions previously performed in computers by vacuum tubes, but are smaller in size, use much less power, and are more reliable. The development of the silicon planar process of manufacturing transistors by Fairchild semiconductor led to the monolithic integrated circuit and the minicomputers of the 1960s. Improvements in monolithic integrated circuits led to the microprocessor in 1971 and the following dramatic reductions in size and cost of microcomputers, to the point that the computer is ubiquitous in the average person's life today.

Without the transistor computers would still be large and massive machines used only in business, universities, and government offices that the average person would have little if any contact with.

Answer 4

Microchips and processors deal with electronic signals that vary. A transistor is used to switch between two different electronic signals and can also amplify the signals really quickly.

Answer 5

We know that base input must be more than 0.7Vdc (approx.) in order to turn on TRANSISTOR.Hence by controlling base voltage , it can be used as switch.

Answer 6

it can be used in buffers,rectifiers,logic gates.

Answer 7

To switch a 5 volt signal on and off in the form of a binary code for just one single input of a logic gate

Answer 8

They are used as switches or amplifiers.