Fairchild Let His Idea Go. Now It's Inside 99% Of All Chips.

Your phone has billions of transistors and still lasts all day. This is the trick that makes it possible. In 1963, at Fairchild Semiconductor, a young physicist named Frank Wanlass paired two opposite kinds of transistor so that when one is on, the other is always off. His demonstration circuit drew about a million times less standby power than the best circuits of the day. He called it nanowatt logic. Today we call it CMOS, and about 99 percent of chips are built with it. This is the story of CMOS. It starts with a battery that dies too fast, runs through a Fairchild lab where a physicist heated transistors with a cigarette lighter, and ends inside almost every device you own, including that little "CMOS battery" on your motherboard. In this documentary: Why every digital circuit of the early 1960s wasted power, even when idle How Frank Wanlass built both kinds of MOSFET at Fairchild The two-switch trick behind CMOS, explained simply "Nanowatt logic": the 1963 paper and patent 3,356,858 Why Fairchild let it go, and why Wanlass left within months How RCA's COS/MOS and the 4000 series kept CMOS alive Digital watches, calculators and the CMOS battery The heat wall that forced Intel to switch to CMOS with the 80386 "I LUV CMOS": what happened to Frank Wanlass Watch the first part of this story, about the MOSFET: https://youtu.be/4oyZiDfoNik?si=mt7pAnSSNH5I8F_c Did you know what the CMOS in "CMOS battery" meant? Tell me in the comments. And if I got a date, a number or a name wrong, tell me there too. I read every comment and I pin corrections. Parts That Changed History tells the stories behind the chips, machines and software that shaped the modern world, and the people who built them. Subscribe for a new story every day. #CMOS #Transistor #Semiconductor #Fairchild #ComputerHistory #ElectronicsHistory #TechHistory #Microchip #Engineering #Electronics #MOSFET #Documentary #History #PartsThatChangedHistory