A mobile phone has become an essential part of modern life. These gadgets play an important role in our daily routine, from sending text messages to capturing photographs. A transistor is a semiconductor device that acts as a binary 0,1 switch to transmit or block signals. Mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and different processors have millions to billions of transistors.
At Bell Labs in 1947, the transistor was first invented by William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain.
You will be interested in knowing what a resistor does in a mobile phone and other devices. In this post, we’ll learn what transistors are and why they are necessary for processors.
What Do Transistors Do in a Mobile Phone?
A mobile phone or PC processor can have billions of transistors that control the device’s functions. For example, transistors will be involved in controlling messaging, background apps, sensors, wifi, and audio player at a time.
Transistors will modify, send and block information and electrical signals. They also build a collection of gyroscopes, compasses, proximity sensors, accelerometers, light sensors, cameras, microphones, speakers, Bluetooth transceivers, and GPS receivers.
Phone transistors, such as 7-10 nanometers, are kept small to minimize power consumption and boost speed.
Now we will discuss the role of transistors in electronic devices, mainly mobile phones, and explain what they do to make our devices work.
The main function of a transistor is to amplify an electrical signal in mobile phones. For example: when we talk on a cellphone, the microphone takes up the sound from our mouth and transmits it through wires to another person’s ear, where they hear the coming sound.
However, if we use a loudspeaker in place of the microphone, we can listen to ourselves talking too. This is how a transistor works and amplifies the signal sent by the microphone and reaches the loudspeaker without any twist.
You might think:
Why are there so many transistors in a mobile phone?
Transistors are a mobile phone chip’s basic and most important component that amplifies and transmits electronic signals and data. A transistor can save up to 4 bits of data.
A transistor controls everything in your phone, like if you are using different applications simultaneously, such as email, messages, audio player, and background apps and sensors. The transistor holds each function and works as a switch to pass the electrical signal for each function.
The more specs and functions your phone has, the more transistors your device will require to run smoothly. That’s why billions of transistors exist on devices such as phones or PCs.
How Do Transistors Work
A transistor is a semiconductor device mainly used to amplify or switch electronic signals and electrical power.
Transistors are small components that control the flow of electricity in a device or circuit. It is composed of semiconductor material with three terminals connecting to the external circuit. They are mostly used in electronic devices such as cell phones, computers, televisions, radios, and many others.
A voltage or current engaged with one pair of the transistor’s terminals changes the current through another given pair of terminals. Because transistors can also be used as digital logic gates (0,1), switches mainly consist of transistors and other components.
Bipolar junction transistors (BJT) and field-effect transistors (FET) are two types of transistors.
- BJTs are smaller and simpler to fabricate; they are more common than FETs.
- On the other hand, FETs lower the noise levels, suited for higher voltage and fast switching speeds.
Transistors can up-to-date the power supply audio amplifiers, circuits, and radio frequency (RF) circuits of mobile phones. They are also used in the monitor circuitry of many cell phones components, such as the display screen and keyboard. In some cases, transistors are also used to make light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
How many transistors are in an iPhone
Different iPhone models have between 2-16 billion transistors. According to Wikipedia:
- An iPhone 13 has around 15 billion transistors.
- The iPhone 14 has around 16 billion transistors.
- iPhone 7 has around 3.3 billion transistors.
- The iPhone 11 contains 8.5 billion transistors.
- iPhone 12 has 13.4 billion transistors.
How many transistors are in a computer?
Computers have around 60 billion transistors, and laptops have 3 billion transistors. However, the number of transistors varies between processors and generations.
Such as
- Intel Core i9 has around 7-8 billion transistors.
- Core i7 has around 3 billion processors.
- Core i5 has around 1.5 billion transistors.
- Core i3 has around 1.3 billion transistors.
Conclusions
Both BJTs and FETs transistors have many applications on mobile phones. Both transistors perform oscillation, mixing, amplifying, filtering, rectifying, impedance matching, switching, and many other functions.
But both types of transistors are affected by some defects. These include low yield, cost, and difficulty with integration. Fortunately, modern technologies are being developed to solve these problems.
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