Semiconductor

A material whose electrical conductivity lies between that of a conductor and an insulator, and which can be precisely controlled by chemical doping. Devices built from semiconducting materials, most consequentially the point-contact transistor built at Bell Labs in 1947, replaced the vacuum tube and became the physical basis of every digital computer since. Computing Atlas describes the semiconductor as the concept underlying the field's hardware and its practice in computation; the materials science of doping and crystal growth is Technology Atlas's own subject, linked here by cross-atlas edge. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/