Mosfet

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A type of transistor that uses an electric field to control the flow of current, widely employed in electronic circuits for amplifying and switching applications
2. An abbreviation for metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, which is essential for modern digital and analog technology due to its efficiency and scalability
3. A semiconductor device characterized by its ability to operate at low power and high speed, commonly found in computers and electronic devices for efficient signal processing

Etymology: MOSFET is an acronym for metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor, and it was built from the names of the layers that make up the device. The metal was originally a gate electrode of aluminium, the oxide is silicon dioxide grown on the silicon surface, and the semiconductor is the silicon beneath it. The "field-effect" part describes how a voltage on the gate creates an electric field that controls current flowing between two other terminals, without the current needing to pass through the gate itself. The device was patented in 1960 by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs, working from earlier field-effect ideas that had been proposed decades before but never built successfully. Its low power draw comes from that insulated gate, which needs very little current to switch the transistor on or off. That property made it the basis for the dense, power-efficient chips that followed, and it is why MOSFETs became the most widely manufactured transistor in history.

Synonyms: transistor, field-effect transistor