Editing Semiconductor device (section)

===World War II===
During World War II, [[radar]] research quickly pushed radar receivers to operate at ever higher [[frequency|frequencies]] about 4000&nbsp;MHz and the traditional tube-based radio receivers no longer worked well. The introduction of the [[cavity magnetron]] from Britain to the United States in 1940 during the [[Tizard Mission]] resulted in a pressing need for a practical high-frequency amplifier.{{Citation needed|date=March 2011}} <!-- or was it an HF rectifier that they needed? -->

On a whim, [[Russell Ohl]] of [[Bell Laboratories]] decided to try a [[cat's-whisker detector|cat's whisker]]. By this point, they had not been in use for a number of years, and no one at the labs had one. After hunting one down at a used radio store in [[Manhattan, New York|Manhattan]], he found that it worked much better than tube-based systems.

Ohl investigated why the cat's whisker functioned so well. He spent most of 1939 trying to grow more pure versions of the crystals. He soon found that with higher-quality crystals their finicky behavior went away, but so did their ability to operate as a radio detector. One day he found one of his purest crystals nevertheless worked well, and it had a clearly visible crack near the middle. However, as he moved about the room trying to test it, the detector would mysteriously work, and then stop again. After some study he found that the behavior was controlled by the light in the room – more light caused more conductance in the crystal. He invited several other people to see this crystal, and [[Walter Brattain]] immediately realized there was some sort of junction at the crack.

Further research cleared up the remaining mystery. The crystal had cracked because either side contained very slightly different amounts of the impurities Ohl could not remove – about 0.2%. One side of the crystal had impurities that added extra electrons (the carriers of electric current) and made it a "conductor". The other had impurities that wanted to bind to these electrons, making it (what he called) an "insulator". Because the two parts of the crystal were in contact with each other, the electrons could be pushed out of the conductive side which had extra electrons (soon to be known as the ''emitter''), and replaced by new ones being provided (from a battery, for instance) where they would flow into the insulating portion and be collected by the whisker filament (named the ''collector''). However, when the voltage was reversed the electrons being pushed into the collector would quickly fill up the "holes" (the electron-needy impurities), and conduction would stop almost instantly. This junction of the two crystals (or parts of one crystal) created a solid-state diode, and the concept soon became known as semiconduction. The mechanism of action when the diode off has to do with the separation of [[charge carrier]]s around the junction. This is called a "[[depletion region]]".