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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
transistor
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
transistor radio
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
switching
▪ The phase winding is excited whenever its switching transistor is saturated by a sufficiently high base current.
▪ A bridge of four diodes, connected in reverse parallel with the switching transistors, provides the path for freewheeling currents.
■ NOUN
radio
▪ He disliked the transistor radio he'd saved up for to get Lavinia for her birthday three years ago.
▪ These sets are no bigger than a transistor radio and cost as little as $ 100 at the nearby discount electronics store.
▪ More stories, more coffee and another try with Pete's transistor radio.
▪ Also his transistor radio and his pocket piece of purple fluorite.
▪ It is less easy to forgive the carriers of blaring transistor radios, a sacrilege in such surroundings.
▪ The wrappings had come off: it was a shattered transistor radio.
▪ Lines of washing hung between the caravans, transistor radios played loudly.
▪ Roosters crowed, transistor radios were turned full volume to occupy the minutes of the unemployed.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Furthermore, the availability of cheap transistors makes obtaining maximum power gain through each transistor rather unimportant in any case.
▪ More stories, more coffee and another try with Pete's transistor radio.
▪ RISCs also have fewer transistors on a chip than CISCs making RISCs cheaper to produce.
▪ The advent of the transistor brought rapid expansion in set ownership.
▪ The modular architecture will integrate 10m transistors.
▪ The Puerto Rican sweepers carried transistors playing Latin music.
▪ The wrappings had come off: it was a shattered transistor radio.
▪ This can easily be obtained with small signal transistors in the output stage.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Transistor

Transistor \Trans*ist"or\, n. [transfer + resistor, from its ability to tranfer a current across a resistor.] (Electronics) a component used in electronic devices consisting of three regions of at least two types of a semiconducting material, such as doped silicon, connected to each other and to three electrodes in a conducting path so as to modify the current or voltage in an electronic circuit.

Note: Transistors are used in almost all modern electronic devices, having replaced the vacuum tube in most applications. Since they are based on the electronic characteristics of solids, they are called solid-state devices. Typically a transistor is composed of p, n, and p-type semiconductors in series, or of n, p, and n, with the center region being a thin layer between the two outer regions. An electronic signal input to the central layer may be substantially amplified by such a device. In integrated circuits, many thousands of transistors may be etched into a single small wafer of silicon.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
transistor

small electronic device, 1948, from transfer + resistor, so called because it transfers an electrical current across a resistor. Said to have been coined by U.S. electrical engineer John Robinson Pierce (1910-2002) of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J., where the device was invented in 1947. It took over many functions of the vacuum tube. Transistor radio is first recorded 1958.

Wiktionary
transistor

n. 1 a solid-state semiconductor device, with three terminals, which can be used for amplification, switching, voltage stabilization, signal modulation, and many other functions 2 (context dated informal English) a transistor radio

WordNet
transistor

n. a semiconductor device capable of amplification [syn: junction transistor, electronic transistor]

Wikipedia
Transistor

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power. It is composed of semiconductor material usually with at least three terminals for connection to an external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be higher than the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Today, some transistors are packaged individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.

The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and is ubiquitous in modern electronic systems. First conceived by Julius Lilienfeld in 1926 and practically implemented in 1947 by American physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics, and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things. The transistor is on the list of IEEE milestones in electronics, and Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.

Transistor (311 album)

Transistor is the fourth studio album by 311. It was released on August 5, 1997. The album was certified platinum. The album saw a change in musical style as fewer songs feature rapping in comparison to the band's previous albums. Upon its release, Transistor received negative reviews from critics, who felt that the record was overlong and self-indulgent. Retrospectively, however, the album has been more positively received.

Transistor (TNT album)

Transistor is the seventh studio album by the Norwegian hard rock band TNT. While it kept the alternative feel of Firefly, it was more successful than Firefly, with the song "Just Like God" receiving some radioplay at US College radio stations.

Transistor (disambiguation)

A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical power.

Transistor may also refer to:

Transistor (song)

"Transistor" is the title track by the band 311 from the album Transistor (1997). The song clocks in at approximately 3:03. A music video was also shot and directed for the single.

Transistor (video game)

Transistor is a science fiction action role-playing video game developed and published by Supergiant Games. The game was released on May 20, 2014, for Microsoft Windows and PlayStation 4, on October 30, 2014, for OS X and Linux, and on June 11, 2015, for iOS devices. Transistor sold over 600,000 copies across all platforms by January 2015.

Usage examples of "transistor".

Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley had taken advantage of the semiconducting qualities of silicon and invented the transistor.

It is normally tetravalent, and is used in transistors, high-powered photoelectric eyes, and, with silicon, in lenses for infrared equipment.

By implanting a unique tetrode transistor into the brain stem, then using a modified broadcast transmitter to emit the proper signal, I can control the behavior of the recipients.

On our television screens, we saw the construction of the cellular fuel tanks, the rocket motors, and the fantastic multitude of pumps, valves, gauges, switches, circuits, transistors, and tubes.

All around the bed were more bookcase-crates, filled with paperbacks and old hardcover books, and on top of most of the crates were radios: clunky 1960 transistor radios, complicated receivers obviously made from kits, simple crystal sets, several Bakelite 1950s models, and even a huge Philco floor radio against the wall near the foot of the bed.

I recognized resistors and transistors but most of it was incomprehensible.

Among the successes was developing the first solid-state computer by replacing vacuum tubes with transistors.

Have you noticed, now, the way people talk so loudly in snackbars and cinemas, how the shelved back gardens shudder with prodigies of talentlessness, drummers, penny-whistlers, vying transistors, the way you see and hear the curses and sign-language of high sexual drama at the bus-stops under ghosts of clouds, how life has come out of doors?

At the moment, Emmet was speaking to Dave Greeley, who was supervising two white-smocked technicians as they telemanipulated Lucky, who was limp as a dish cloth, into a low walled box set between banks of electronic tubes and transistors.

Pyramids understood: wires, relays, generators, electron tubes, transistors, thermistors, spacistors, transformers and whatever depended utterly on them.

And we can get the other elements needed by cannibalizing, and an alloying unit aboard could be adapted to manufacture the transistors themselves.

Then the transistors were replaced by magnetic cores in a computer named Bogart.

Scientists working on one DARPA program recently speculated that it may soon be possible to fashion tiny switches, or transistors, from tiny clusters of molecules only a single layer deep.

The number of transistors industry can cram on a chip doubles every eighteen months?

Marley and his Wailers also yelled out of oversize transistor radios along the crowded palm-tree-lined sidewalks.