How Shrinking Feature Size Made Modern Wireless Work
1 min read
Summary
A MESFET, or metal-semiconductor field-effect transistor, was one of the first high-performance semiconductor devices to enable fast radio-frequency (RF) switching, in the days when most RF silicon had to be done with discrete parts.
These devices have now been largely eclipsed by standard metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), which became dominant as their feature size shrank and they became faster.
This was due to a shrink in the thickness of the oxide layer and the size of the gates in MOSFETs, which decreased the capacitance and increased the speed of the MOSFET, making them faster than a MESFET.
Industry observer DVICE speculates that had this not been the case, we might not have the mobile phones we have today.
