The transistors at the heart of every computer, today numbering in the billions on a single chip, have generally been based on the concept John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley first turned into a prototype at the Bell Labs in 1947. Physicists have now demonstrated a radically simpler transistor design, first patented by Austrian physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925 but never turned into a practical device until now. This simpler version could push computers to become faster and to consume less power.
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