"More than a billion transistors are manufactured every second."

• Transistors have three leads on them: base, collector, and emitter.
• When a current is sent through the base, another current is sent through the emitter. When these signals combine, the result is signals double or possibly triple in strength.
• The signal is passed out of the transistor by way of the collector.
• Transistors are either bipolar junction transistors (BJT) or field effect transistors (FET).
• Bipolar transistors are named bipolar because their operation involves both electrons and holes.
• The field effect transistor depends on an electric field to control the shape and the conductivity of a channel in a semiconductor material.
• Transistors have input terminals, a common terminal, and an output terminal.
• In analog circuits, transistors are used in amplifiers and linear regulated power supplies.
• Transistors are used in digital circuits as electrical switches. Digital circuits include logic gates, random access memory, and microprocessors.
• The application of current or voltage between the input terminal and the common terminal causes an increase in the conductivity between the common and output terminals. This allows the controlling current to flow between them.
• A transistor is basically a device that is active in one direction only and can draw more or less current through its load resistor which is sometimes called a pull-up resistor.
• With the transistor being a current device, any signal voltage has to first be converted to a current.
• The transistor is unable to generate both a positive and a negative signal. The transistor is able to only draw more or less current.
• Plasma televisions have transistors instead of a light source and each pixel contains three fluorescent light cell; a red, green, and blue.
• TFT stands for thin-film transistors which are used by many of the high-end notebook computers along with active matrix liquid crystal displays.
• In analog circuits, such as those in music reproduction applications, transistors are used as signal amplifiers.