On May 31, 1960, two Bell Labs engineers filed US Patent 3,102,230 — "Electric Field Controlled Semiconductor Device." The inventors were Mohamed M. "John" Atalla, an Egyptian-born engineer, and Dawon Kahng, a Korean-born physicist. Almost nobody remembers their names. But by some estimates, humans have manufactured more than 13 sextillion (1.3 × 10²²) copies of their invention — making the MOSFET the most-produced artifact in the history of our species, by orders of magnitude.

What it actually did

A MOSFET — Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor — is a switch with no moving parts. Apply a small voltage to a "gate" electrode, and a microscopic channel of charge forms underneath a thin layer of silicon dioxide insulator, letting current flow between two other terminals (source and drain). Remove the voltage and the channel vanishes. Off. On. Off. On.

Crucially, the gate is insulated. Almost no current flows into it. That means a MOSFET draws essentially zero power when idle — a property that, scaled up to billions of devices on a chip, is the only reason your phone doesn't melt.

Why it was overlooked for a decade

Bell Labs had bet on the bipolar junction transistor (Shockley, 1948) and treated the MOSFET as a curiosity. The silicon-dioxide gate was finicky; surface contamination ruined yields. RCA, Fairchild, and a tiny startup called Intel quietly pushed it forward. The breakthroughs came:

• 1963: Frank Wanlass at Fairchild patented CMOS — pairing N-type and P-type MOSFETs so the circuit only burns power when switching (US Patent 3,356,858).
• 1967: Kahng and Simon Sze invented the floating-gate MOSFET — the foundation of every flash drive, SSD, and SD card on Earth.
• 1971: Intel's 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, used 2,300 MOSFETs.
• 2024: Apple's M4 chip packs roughly 28 billion MOSFETs into a fingernail-sized die.

The scaling miracle

Atalla and Kahng's original device had a channel about 25 micrometers long. Modern "3nm" process nodes have effective gate lengths under 20 nanometers — roughly 1,250× smaller. The basic structure in their 1960 patent diagram is still recognizable in today's FinFETs and gate-all-around transistors. The geometry got weirder; the physics got harder; but the fundamental idea — use a field, not a current, to control conduction — has not changed in 66 years.

Could it be built better now?

It already has been, repeatedly — and we're approaching the limit. Below about 1 nm, quantum tunneling lets electrons leak through gate oxides regardless of voltage. The industry's response is to wrap the gate around the channel on three or four sides (FinFET, GAAFET, RibbonFET) and to use exotic dielectrics like hafnium oxide. But every solution is still a variation on Atalla and Kahng's central trick.

The forgotten inventors

Atalla later founded a security company that pioneered the hardware security module — the device that protects nearly every ATM PIN transaction today. Kahng went on to invent the floating-gate cell that stores this very webpage. Neither received a Nobel Prize. Neither is a household name. Yet between them, they built the substrate of the digital civilization.