Episode 92: How Computers Work Part II - Silicon and Transistors

The Science of Everything Podcast

James Fodor

Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Science

4.8 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 9 January 2018

⏱️ 72 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this second episode in the series, I explain binary digital coding to motivate a discussion of the operation of transistors. Beginning with an examination of the properties of semiconductors and why they are useful for constructing transistors, I then examine how MOSFET transistors are constructed by combining pMOS and nMOS semiconductors.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, wow, oh, oh, oh, wow, oh, oh, wow.
0:13.0	Oh, wow.
0:15.0	Oh, wow. Hello, you're listening to The Science of Everything podcast episode 92,
0:42.2	How Computers Work Part 2, Silicon and Transistors.
0:44.1	I'm your host, James Fodor.
0:51.2	So, in this episode, we're going to be talking about the two lowest levels of the computer levels hierarchy that I mentioned in the previous episode.
0:53.3	We're going to be looking at the level of individual atoms and electrons in silicon semiconductors and why semiconductors are used and how the properties of semiconductors arise from the underlying quantum mechanics of those materials. And we'll also be talking about how we use silicon to produce transistors that are in turn
1:14.0	used to produce logic gates that are used in computers, but that we'll get to in the next episode.
1:19.2	Recommended pre-listing for this episode is obviously the previous episode, episode 91, How Computers
1:23.9	Work. Strongly recommend you listen to all of these in sequence, otherwise they may not make sense.
1:29.5	Also, I recommend you listen to one of the previous episodes on quantum mechanics.
1:34.3	This could be episodes 83 and 84, advanced quantum mechanics, parts one and two,
1:39.6	but episode 14, principles of quantum mechanics may be sufficient as well.
1:43.8	That will just give you
1:44.6	a little bit of background that we're useful for understanding some of those stuff that I talk about
1:47.3	regarding semiconductors. So, before we jump into that, let's make us start talking about how
1:53.9	modern computers use binary coding to represent information. And once we talk about that, it'll become
2:00.1	clear as to why we need semiconductors and transistors.
2:03.6	So, as I mentioned in the previous episode, modern digital computers represent not just numbers, but actually everything, all information, using binary sequences of zeros and ones.
2:13.6	Binary just means two, so there's either it's either a zero or it's a one. You can't have a two or a three. That doesn't make sense from a computer's perspective.
2:22.3	These zeros and ones are not numbers. It's not the natural number one, for example, that we're talking about. These are symbols, the symbol zero and the symbol one.
2:31.3	You can use zeros and ones in a binary number system to represent any number
	...

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