SMART PHONE FROM SAND

Your smart phone mainly made up of pure sand-silicon. Yes, It is true. Mostly life forms are carbon based. But the electronic gadgets are silicon based (Today). Life forms are made of cells. But electronic goods are made of 'transistors'.

What is transistor? It has three parts Emitter, base and collector. We can give input signal (voltage) to any pair (eg: base and emitter) and get output voltage from another pair(emitter and collector). One can control output voltages using tiny input signals. Hence amplification is possible in it. Transistor can be used as a switch (ON and OFF ) . Hence Binary numbers (0 and 1 ) can be stored and manipulated by transistors. Transistors are found in thousands or even in millions in many electronic devices. Computers, internet, smartphone, Automobile electronics, Medical electronics, all made possible because of tiny transistors. Today transistors are hair-thin. Transistor is mainly made of silicon(sand), little boron and a little phosphorus. Transistor act by controlling the flow of electrons. Transistor can also be compared to a value in a water pipe. Before the invention of Transistor, vacuum tubes were used. They were bulky and consumed lot of electrical energy. (Long back, A crude computer was constructed using vacuum tubes ,switched on and the entire city voltage dropped).

The main electronic elements like transistor, Resistor, capacitor, inductor can be made using silicon. Hence it is possible to construct or fabricate entire electronic circuit on a thin silicon wafer. That is microchip. Today complex circuit with millions of electronic components is fabricated on a nail sized silicon wafer. Hence today's electronic gadgets are compact, powerful and cheap. Think, how many gadgets the smartphone made extinct.

Tomorrow, the transistor could be a few atoms thick. DNA may replace silicon memory, High level quantum physics will play some role in electronics.
Anyway, clever use of sand, invention of transistor, design of microchip brought in information and technological revolution.
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