text:
Transistor, semiconductor device for amplifying, controlling, and generating electrical signals. Transistors are the active components of integrated circuits, or "microchips," which often contain billions of these minuscule devices etched into their shiny surfaces. Deeply embedded in almost everything electronic, transistors have become the nerve cells of the Information Age.
There are typically three electrical leads in a transistor, called the emitter, the collector, and the base—or, in modern switching applications, the source, the drain, and the gate. An electrical signal applied to the base (or gate) influences the semiconductor material's ability to conduct electrical current, which flows between the emitter (or source) and collector (or drain) in most applications. A voltage source such as a battery drives the current, while the rate of current flow through the transistor at any given moment is governed by an input signal at the gate—much as a faucet valve is used to regulate the flow of water through a garden hose.
The first commercial applications for transistors were for hearing aids and "pocket" radios during the 1950s. With their small size and low power consumption, transistors were desirable substitutes for the vacuum tubes (known as "valves" in Great Britain) then used to amplify weak electrical signals and produce audible sounds. Transistors also began to replace vacuum tubes in the oscillator circuits used to generate radio signals, especially after specialized structures were developed to handle the higher frequencies and power levels involved. Low-frequency, high-power applications, such as power-supply inverters that convert alternating current (AC) into direct current (DC), have also been transistorized. Some power transistors can now handle currents of hundreds of amperes at electric potentials over a thousand volts.
By far the most common application of transistors today is for computer memory chips—including solid-state multimedia storage devices for electronic games, cameras, and MP3 players—and microprocessors, where millions of components are embedded in a single integrated circuit. Here the voltage applied to the gate electrode, generally a few volts or less, determines whether current can flow from the transistor's source to its drain. In this case the transistor operates as a switch: if a current flows, the circuit involved is on, and if not, it is off. These two distinct states, the only possibilities in such a circuit, correspond respectively to the binary 1s and 0s employed in digital computers. Similar applications of transistors occur in the complex switching circuits used throughout modern telecommunications systems. The potential switching speeds of these transistors now are hundreds of gigahertz, or more than 100 billion on-and-off cycles per second.
Development of transistors
The transistor was invented in 1947–48 by three American physicists, John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William B. Shockley, at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's Bell Laboratories. The transistor proved to be a viable alternative to the electron tube and, by the late 1950s, supplanted the latter in many applications. Its small size, low heat generation, high reliability, and low power consumption made possible a breakthrough in the miniaturization of complex circuitry. During the 1960s and '70s, transistors were incorporated into integrated circuits, in which a multitude of components (e.g., diodes, resistors, and capacitors) are formed on a single "chip" of semiconductor material.
Motivation and early radar research
Electron tubes are bulky and fragile, and they consume large amounts of power to heat their cathode filaments and generate streams of electrons; also, they often burn out after several thousand hours of operation. Electromechanical switches, or relays, are slow and can become stuck in the on or off position. For applications requiring thousands of tubes or switches, such as the nationwide telephone systems developing around the world in the 1940s and the first electronic digital computers, this meant constant vigilance was needed to minimize the inevitable breakdowns.
An alternative was found in semiconductors, materials such as silicon or germanium whose electrical conductivity lies midway between that of insulators such as glass and conductors such as aluminum. The conductive properties of semiconductors can be controlled by "doping" them with select impurities, and a few visionaries had seen the potential of such devices for telecommunications and computers. However, it was military funding for radar development in the 1940s that opened the door to their realization. The "superheterodyne" electronic circuits used to detect radar waves required a diode rectifier—a device that allows current to flow in just one direction—that could operate successfully at ultrahigh frequencies over one gigahertz. Electron tubes just did not suffice, and solid-state diodes based on existing copper-oxide semiconductors were also much too slow for this purpose.
Crystal rectifiers based on silicon and germanium came to the rescue. In these devices a tungsten wire was jabbed into the surface of the semiconductor material, which was doped with tiny amounts of impurities, such as boron or phosphorus. The impurity atoms assumed positions in the material's crystal lattice, displacing silicon (or germanium) atoms and thereby generating tiny populations of charge carriers (such as electrons) capable of conducting usable electrical current. Depending on the nature of the charge carriers and the applied voltage, a current could flow from the wire into the surface or vice-versa, but not in both directions. Thus, these devices served as the much-needed rectifiers operating at the gigahertz frequencies required for detecting rebounding microwave radiation in military radar systems. By the end of World War II, millions of crystal rectifiers were being produced annually by such American manufacturers as Sylvania and Western Electric.
Innovation at Bell Labs
Executives at Bell Labs had recognized that semiconductors might lead to solid-state alternatives to the electron-tube amplifiers and electromechanical switches employed throughout the nationwide Bell telephone system. In 1936 the new director of research at Bell Labs, Mervin Kelly, began recruiting solid-state physicists. Among his first recruits was William B. Shockley, who proposed a few amplifier designs based on copper-oxide semiconductor materials then used to make diodes. With the help of Walter H. Brattain, an experimental physicist already working at Bell Labs, he even tried to fabricate a prototype device in 1939, but it failed completely. Semiconductor theory could not yet explain exactly what was happening to electrons inside these devices, especially at the interface between copper and its oxide. Compounding the difficulty of any theoretical understanding was the problem of controlling the exact composition of these early semiconductor materials, which were binary combinations of different chemical elements (such as copper and oxygen).
With the close of World War II, Kelly reorganized Bell Labs and created a new solid-state research group headed by Shockley. The postwar search for a solid-state amplifier began in April 1945 with Shockley's suggestion that silicon and germanium semiconductors could be used to make a field-effect amplifier (see integrated circuit: Field-effect transistors). He reasoned that an electric field from a third electrode could increase the conductivity of a sliver of semiconductor material just beneath it and thereby allow usable current to flow through the sliver. But attempts to fabricate such a device by Brattain and others in Shockley's group again failed. The following March, John Bardeen, a theoretical physicist whom Shockley had hired for his group, offered a possible explanation. Perhaps electrons drawn to the semiconductor surface by the electric field were blocking the penetration of this field into the bulk material, thereby preventing it from influencing the conductivity.
Bardeen's conjecture spurred a basic research program at Bell Labs into the behaviour of these "surface-state" electrons. While studying this phenomenon in November 1947, Brattain stumbled upon a way to neutralize their blocking effect and permit the applied field to penetrate deep into the semiconductor material. Working closely together over the next month, Bardeen and Brattain invented the first successful semiconductor amplifier, called the point-contact transistor, on December 16, 1947. Similar to the World War II crystal rectifiers, this weird-looking device had not one but two closely spaced metal wires jabbing into the surface of a semiconductor—in this case, germanium. The input signal on one of these wires (the emitter) boosted the conductivity of the germanium beneath both of them, thus modulating the output signal on the other wire (the collector). Observers present at a demonstration of this device the following week could hear amplified voices in the earphones that it powered. Shockley later called this invention a "magnificent Christmas present" for the farsighted company, which had supported the research program that made this breakthrough.
Not to be outdone by members of his own group, Shockley conceived yet another way to fabricate a semiconductor amplifier the very next month, on January 23, 1948. His junction transistor was basically a three-layer sandwich of germanium or silicon in which the adjacent layers would be doped with different impurities to induce distinct electrical characteristics. An input signal entering the middle layer—the "meat" of the semiconductor sandwich—determined how much current flowed from one end of the device to the other under the influence of an applied voltage. Shockley's device is often called the bipolar junction transistor because its operation requires that the negatively charged electrons and their positively charged counterparts (the holes corresponding to an absence of electrons in the crystal lattice) coexist briefly in the presence of one another.
The name transistor, a combination of transfer and resistor, was coined for these devices in May 1948 by Bell Labs electrical engineer John Robinson Pierce, who was also a science-fiction author in his spare time. A month later Bell Labs announced the revolutionary invention in a press conference held at its New York City headquarters, heralding Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley as the three coinventors of the transistor. The three were eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for their invention.
Although the point-contact transistor was the first transistor invented, it faced a difficult gestation period and was eventually used only in a switch made for the Bell telephone system. Manufacturing them reliably and with uniform operating characteristics proved a daunting problem, largely because of hard-to-control variations in the metal-to-semiconductor point contacts.
Shockley had foreseen these difficulties in the process of conceiving the junction transistor, which he figured would be much easier to manufacture. But it still required more than three years, until mid-1951, to resolve its own development problems. Bell Labs scientists, engineers, and technicians first had to find ways to make ultrapure germanium and silicon, form large crystals of these elements, dope them with narrow layers of the required impurities, and attach delicate wires to these layers to serve as electrodes. In July 1951 Bell Labs announced the successful invention and development of the junction transistor, this time with only Shockley in the spotlight.
Commercial transistors began to roll off production lines during the 1950s, after Bell Labs licensed the technology of their production to other companies, including General Electric, Raytheon, RCA, Sylvania, and Transitron Electronics. Transistors found ready applications in lightweight devices such as hearing aids and portable radios. Texas Instruments Inc., working with the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates, manufactured the first transistor radio in late 1954. Selling for $49.95, the Regency TR-1 employed four germanium junction transistors in a multistage amplifier of radio signals. The very next year a new Japanese company, Sony, introduced its own transistor radio and began to corner the market for this and other transistorized consumer electronics.
Transistors also began replacing vacuum tubes in the digital computers manufactured by IBM, Control Data, and other companies. "It seems to me that in these robot brains the transistor is the ideal nerve cell," Shockley had observed in a 1949 radio interview. "The advantage of the transistor is that it is inherently a small-size and low-power device," noted Bell Labs circuit engineer Robert Wallace early in the 1950s. "This means you can pack a large number of them in a small space without excessive heat generation and achieve low propagation delays. And that's what you need for logic applications. The significance of the transistor is not that it can replace the tube but that it can do things the vacuum tube could never do!" After 1955 IBM started purchasing germanium transistors from Texas Instruments to employ in its computer circuits. By the end of the 1950s, bipolar junction transistors had almost completely replaced electron tubes in computer applications.
Silicon transistors
During the 1950s, meanwhile, scientists and engineers at Bell Labs and Texas Instruments were developing advanced technologies needed to produce silicon transistors. Because of its higher melting temperature and greater reactivity, silicon was much more difficult to work with than germanium, but it offered major prospects for better performance, especially in switching applications. Germanium transistors make leaky switches; substantial leakage currents can flow when these devices are supposedly in their off state. Silicon transistors have far less leakage. In 1954 Texas Instruments produced the first commercially available silicon junction transistors and quickly dominated this new market—especially for military applications, in which their high cost was of little concern.
In the mid-1950s Bell Labs focused its transistor-development efforts around new diffusion technologies, in which very narrow semiconductor layers—with thicknesses measured in microns, or millionths of a metre—are prepared by diffusing impurity atoms into the semiconductor surface from a hot gas. Inside a diffusion furnace the impurity atoms penetrate more readily into the silicon or germanium surface; their penetration depth is controlled by varying the density, temperature, and pressure of the gas as well as the processing time. (See integrated circuit: Fabricating ICs.) For the first time, diodes and transistors produced by these diffusion implantation processes functioned at frequencies above 100 megahertz (100 million cycles per second). These diffused-base transistors could be used in receivers and transmitters for FM radio and television, which operate at such high frequencies.
Another important breakthrough occurred at Bell Labs in 1955, when Carl Frosch and Link Derick developed a means of producing a glassy silicon dioxide outer layer on the silicon surface during the diffusion process. This layer offered transistor producers a promising way to protect the silicon underneath from further impurities once the diffusion process was finished and the desired electrical properties had been established.
Texas Instruments, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, and other companies took the lead in applying these diffusion technologies to the large-scale manufacture of transistors. At Fairchild, physicist Jean Hoerni developed the planar manufacturing process, whereby the various semiconductor layers and their sensitive interfaces are embedded beneath a protective silicon dioxide outer layer. The company was soon making and selling planar silicon transistors, largely for military applications. Led by Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore, Fairchild's scientists and engineers extended this revolutionary technique to the manufacture of integrated circuits.
In the late 1950s Bell Labs researchers developed ways to use the new diffusion technologies to realize Shockley's original 1945 idea of a field-effect transistor (FET). To do so, they had to overcome the problem of surface-state electrons, which would otherwise have blocked external electric fields from penetrating into the semiconductor. They succeeded by carefully cleaning the silicon surface and growing a very pure silicon dioxide layer on it. This approach reduced the number of surface-state electrons at the interface between the silicon and oxide layers, permitting fabrication of the first successful field-effect transistor in 1960 at Bell Labs—which, however, did not pursue its development any further.
Refinements of the FET design by other companies, especially RCA and Fairchild, resulted in the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) during the early 1960s. The key problems to be solved were the stability and reliability of these MOS transistors, which relied upon interactions occurring at or near the sensitive silicon surface rather than deep inside. The two firms began to make MOS transistors commercially available in late 1964.
In early 1963 Frank Wanlass at Fairchild developed the complementary MOS (CMOS) transistor circuit, based on a pair of MOS transistors. This approach eventually proved ideal for use in integrated circuits because of its simplicity of production and very low power dissipation during standby operation. Stability problems continued to plague MOS transistors, however, until researchers at Fairchild developed solutions in the mid-1960s. By the end of the decade, MOS transistors were beginning to displace bipolar junction transistors in microchip manufacturing. Since the late 1980s CMOS has been the technology of choice for digital applications, while bipolar transistors are now used primarily for analog and microwave devices.
Transistor principles
The p-n junction
The operation of junction transistors, as well as most other semiconductor devices, depends heavily on the behaviour of electrons and holes at the interface between two dissimilar layers, known as a p-n junction. Discovered in 1940 by Bell Labs electrochemist Russell Ohl, p-n junctions are formed by adding two different impurity elements to adjacent regions of germanium or silicon. The addition of these impurity elements is called doping. Atoms of elements from Group 15 of the periodic table (which possess five valence electrons), such as phosphorus or arsenic, contribute an electron that has no natural resting place within the crystal lattice. These excess electrons are therefore loosely bound and relatively free to roam about, acting as charge carriers that can conduct electrical current. Atoms of elements from Group 13 (which have three valence electrons), such as boron or aluminum, induce a deficit of electrons when added as impurities, effectively creating "holes" in the lattice. These positively charged quantum mechanical entities are also fairly free to roam around and conduct electricity. Under the influence of an electric field, the electrons and holes move in opposite directions. During and immediately after World War II, chemists and metallurgists at Bell Labs perfected techniques of adding impurities to high-purity silicon and germanium to induce the desired electron-rich layer (known as the n-layer) and the electron-poor layer (known as the p-layer) in these semiconductors, as described in the section Development of transistors.
A p-n junction acts as a rectifier, similar to the old point-contact crystal rectifiers, permitting easy flow of current in only a single direction. If no voltage is applied across the junction, electrons and holes will gather on opposite sides of the interface to form a depletion layer that will act as an insulator between the two sides. A negative voltage applied to the n-layer will drive the excess electrons within it toward the interface, where they will combine with the positively charged holes attracted there by the electric field. Current will then flow easily. If instead a positive voltage is applied to the n-layer, the resulting electric field will draw electrons away from the interface, so combinations of them with holes will occur much less often. In this case current will not flow (other than tiny leakage currents). Thus, electricity will flow in only one direction through a p-n junction.
Junction transistors
Shortly after his colleagues John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain invented their point-contact device, Bell Labs physicist William B. Shockley recognized that these rectifying characteristics might also be used in making a junction transistor. In a 1949 paper Shockley explained the physical principles behind the operation of these junctions and showed how to use them in a three-layer—n-p-n or p-n-p—device that could act as a solid-state amplifier or switch. Electric current would flow from one end to the other, with the voltage applied to the inner layer governing how much current rushed by at any given moment. In the n-p-n junction transistor, for example, electrons would flow from one n-layer through the inner p-layer to the other n-layer. Thus, a weak electrical signal applied to the inner, base layer would modulate the current flowing through the entire device. For this current to flow, some of the electrons would have to survive briefly in the presence of holes; in order to reach the second n-layer, they could not all combine with holes in the p-layer. Such bipolar operation was not at all obvious when Shockley first conceived his junction transistor. Experiments with increasingly pure crystals of silicon and germanium showed that it indeed occurred, making bipolar junction transistors possible.
To achieve bipolar operation, it also helps that the base layer be narrow, so that electrons (in n-p-n transistors) and holes (in p-n-p) do not have to travel very far in the presence of their opposite numbers. Narrow base layers also promote high-frequency operation of junction transistors: the narrower the base, the higher the operating frequency. That is a major reason why there was so much interest in developing diffused-base transistors during the 1950s, as described in the section Silicon transistors. Their microns-thick bases permitted transistors to operate above 100 megahertz (100 million cycles per second) for the first time.
MOS-type transistors
A similar principle applies to metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistors, but here it is the distance between source and drain that largely determines the operating frequency. In an n-channel MOS (NMOS) transistor, for example, the source and the drain are two n-type regions that have been established in a piece of p-type semiconductor, usually silicon. Except for the two points at which metal leads contact these regions, the entire semiconductor surface is covered by an insulating oxide layer. The metal gate, usually aluminum, is deposited atop the oxide layer just above the gap between source and drain. If there is no voltage (or a negative voltage) upon the gate, the semiconductor material beneath it will contain excess holes, and very few electrons will be able to cross the gap, because one of the two p-n junctions will block their path. Therefore, no current will flow in this configuration—other than unavoidable leakage currents. If the gate voltage is instead positive, an electric field will penetrate through the oxide layer and attract electrons into the silicon layer (often called the inversion layer) directly beneath the gate. Once this voltage exceeds a specific threshold value, electrons will begin flowing easily between source and drain. The transistor turns on.
Analogous behaviour occurs in a p-channel MOS transistor, in which the source and the drain are p-type regions formed in n-type semiconductor material. Here a negative voltage above a threshold induces a layer of holes (instead of electrons) beneath the gate and permits a current of them to flow from source to drain. For both n-channel and p-channel MOS (also called NMOS and PMOS) transistors, the operating frequency is largely governed by the speed at which the electrons or holes can drift through the semiconductor material divided by the distance from source to drain. Because electrons have mobilities through silicon that are about three times higher than holes, NMOS transistors can operate at substantially higher frequencies than PMOS transistors. Small separations between source and drain also promote high-frequency operation, and extensive efforts have been devoted to reducing this distance.
In the 1960s Frank Wanlass of Fairchild Semiconductor recognized that combinations of an NMOS and a PMOS transistor would draw extremely little current in standby operation—just the tiny, unavoidable leakage currents. These CMOS, or complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, transistor circuits consume significant power only when the gate voltage exceeds some threshold and a current flows from source to drain. Thus, they can serve as very low-power devices, often a million times lower than the equivalent bipolar junction transistors. Together with their inherent simplicity of fabrication, this feature of CMOS transistors has made them the natural choice for manufacturing microchips, which today cram millions of transistors into a surface area smaller than a fingernail. In such cases the waste heat generated by the component's power consumption must be kept to an absolute minimum, or the chips will simply melt.
Field-effect transistors
Another kind of unipolar transistor, called the metal-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MESFET), is particularly well suited for microwave and other high-frequency applications because it can be manufactured from semiconductor materials with high electron mobilities that do not support an insulating oxide surface layer. These include compound semiconductors such as germanium-silicon and gallium arsenide. A MESFET is built much like a MOS transistor but with no oxide layer between the gate and the underlying conduction channel. Instead, the gate makes a direct, rectifying contact with the channel, which is generally a thin layer of n-type semiconductor supported underneath by an insulating substrate. A negative voltage on the gate induces a depletion layer just beneath it that restricts the flow of electrons between source and drain. The device acts like a voltage-controlled resistor; if the gate voltage is large enough, it can block this flow almost completely. By contrast, a positive voltage on the gate encourages electrons to traverse the channel.
To improve MESFET performance even further, advanced devices known as heterojunction field-effect transistors have been developed, in which p-n junctions are established between two slightly dissimilar semiconductor materials, such as gallium arsenide and aluminum gallium arsenide. By properly controlling the impurities in the two substances, a high-conductivity channel can be formed at their interface, promoting the flow of electrons through it. If one semiconductor is a high-purity material, its electron mobility can be large, resulting in a high operating frequency for this kind of transistor. (The electron mobility of gallium arsenide, for example, is five times that of silicon.) Heterojunction MESFETs are increasingly used for microwave applications such as cellular telephone systems.
Transistors and Moore's law
In 1965, four years after Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation and Texas Instruments Inc. marketed their first integrated circuits, Fairchild research director Gordon E. Moore made a prediction in a special issue of Electronics magazine. Observing that the total number of components in these circuits had roughly doubled each year, he blithely extrapolated this annual doubling to the next decade, estimating that microcircuits of 1975 would contain an astounding 65,000 components per chip.
History proved Moore correct. His bold extrapolation has since become enshrined as Moore's law—though its doubling period was lengthened to 18 months in the mid-1970s. What has made this dramatic explosion in circuit complexity possible is the steadily shrinking size of transistors over the decades. Measured in millimetres in the late 1940s, the dimensions of a typical transistor are typically about 10 nanometres, a reduction factor of over 100,000. Submicron transistor features were attained during the 1980s, when dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips began offering megabit storage capacities. At the dawn of the 21st century, these features approached 0.1 micron across, which allowed the manufacture of gigabit memory chips and microprocessors that operate at gigahertz frequencies. Moore's law continued into the second decade of the 21st century with the introduction of three-dimensional transistors that were tens of nanometres in size.
As the size of transistors has shrunk, their cost has plummeted correspondingly from tens of dollars apiece to thousandths of a penny. As Moore was fond of saying, every year more transistors are produced than raindrops over California, and it costs less to make one than to print a single character on the page of a book. They are by far the most common human artifact on the planet. Deeply embedded in everything electronic, transistors permeate modern life almost as thoroughly as molecules permeate matter. Cheap, portable, and reliable equipment based on this remarkable device can be found in almost any village and hamlet in the world. This tiny invention, by making possible the Information Age, has transformed the world into a truly global society, making it a far more intimately connected place than ever before.
Learn More in these related Britannica articles:
computer: Transistor sizeThe size of transistor elements continually decreases in order to pack more on a chip. In 2001 a transistor commonly had dimensions of 0.25 micron (or micrometre; 1 micron = 10−6 metre), and 0.1 micron was projected for 2006. This latter size would…
radio technology: Active devices: vacuum tubes and transistorsAn electron tube or transistor, designated an active element, functions basically as an amplifier, and its output is essentially an amplified copy of the original input signal. The simplest amplifying electron tube is the triode, consisting of a cathode coated with material that provides…
Texas Instruments Incorporated: Transistors to integrated circuitsIn 1951 the company changed its name to Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) in order to reflect growing diversification in the company's business. The following year TI purchased a license from Western Electric to manufacture transistors, which Haggerty believed could be integrated…
radar: Transmitters>transistor, are attractive because of their potential for long life, ease of maintenance, and relatively wide bandwidth. An individual solid-state device generates relatively low power and can be used only when the radar application can be accomplished with low power (as in short-range applications or…
Gordon MooreGordon Moore, American engineer and cofounder, with Robert Noyce, of Intel Corporation. Moore studied chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley (B.S., 1950), and in 1954 he received a Ph.D. in chemistry and physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Pasadena. After…
More About Transistor21 references found in Britannica articles
Assorted References
- development of integrated circuits
- history of electronics
- minority carrier injection
- In digital computer: Development of the digital computer
- In history of technology: Automation and the computer
- In computer: The IBM 360
- computer memory
- integrated-circuit technology
- ignition systems


text: Our S2468UGN has 5 x 36 GB IBM disks in it, 2 on one SCSI bus, 3 on the other. These are IBM IC35L036UWD210-0. They work fine, pass all diagnostics, including exhaustive surface testing using IBM's Drive Fitness Test 3.10. But the odd thing is that there is a semiperiodic (mean maybe 20 seconds, but huge variance) noise from one or more of the disks which sounds for all the world like a quieter version of a DLT tape repositioning. That is, a longish (1.5 seconds?) whir followed immediately by a shorter sort of "shunk" at the end. Some sort of movement sound, but not anything that sounds like an overt failure. I can't see the individual drive lights on these disks because of the way they are mounted, in fact, I don't even know that they have drive lights, so I can't really say if this is one drive doing this or all 5 drives doing it once in a while. The main system drive light does not come on when this sound is made. I upgraded to the latest Tyan BIOS (v4.03) and it still occurs. The sound is produced whenever there is power: sitting in the BIOS, waiting in DOS, running linux, etc. Has anybody else observed this? Any idea what it might be? Thanks, David Mathog mathog at caltech.edu Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech

subset: commoncrawl


text:
5.0 Mustang & Super FordsFeatured Vehicles
1992 Ford Mustang - Green Party
Dennis Chandler's Emerald Green '92 rocks modern 5.0 power
You might call Dennis Chandler a consummate go-fast guy. Not one to be pigeonholed into a particular genre or brand, Dennis seems to pretty well appreciate anything with four wheels and a muscular mentality. To the point, over the last 50 years he's owned both pre-war and post-war street rods, Chevys and Fords, vintage and modern musclecars, and a slew of small-blocks and big-blocks. In short, Dennis has experienced a wide swath of the high-performance world, and relished it all.
With the above as background, it comes as no surprise that such an enthusiast would react to the newest wave of high-tech FoMoCo V-8s with a big embrace. How big? Well, witness the '92 notch seen here as an indication.
Dennis explains that he's owned this particular Fox Mustang since 1995, when he bought the virgin Deep Emerald Green two-door with a scant 20,000 ticks on the clock. Never a fan of the automatic or stock nature of the pushrod 5.0-liter that came delivered from Dearborn, Dennis was slow to act on a plan that at one time called for a stroker 351 and five-speed swap—he says too many project cars will do that to a guy. In this case, it's a good thing, for when Ford's Coyote 5.0 arrived on the scene, Dennis had yet to turn a wrench under the hood of the '92.
"It's kinda funny" muses Dennis, "My initial intention for the new 5.0-liter was to put one in my '32 Ford pickup, but after purchasing a crate engine at the end of 2010, I was sort of overtaken by the idea of swapping it into the '92." Easier said than done of course, though the great thing about this swap compared to some vintage chassis is that the high-tech Coyote is a bolt-in—as in no cutting required. However, as anyone savvy to modern engine swaps would know, bolt-in in this instance isn't as simplistic as shoehorning a 460 into a '79 Mustang. Dennis recognized these realities, and despite considerable skills and experience spinning wrenches himself, he turned the project over to Brad Siebold and company at Brad's Custom Auto in mid-2011.
From the outset, both owner and shop shared a similar vision for the end result. Dennis wanted a powerful Fox Mustang that would look and function as if the Coyote were factory. As such, quality work and craftsmanship were a must. The crew at Brad's were equally enamored by the concept, and eager to discover how to overcome a litany of obstacles that would be encountered along the way. Ace technician Brian Holsten would lead the effort, and took care of the easy part—the physical engine swap—within hours of Dennis dropping off the car and engine at Brad's Seattle-based digs. We stumbled across the original-paint notch a few days later, when Brad and Brian trailered it to a local show for display. Even though it was far from finished, the car made quite a splash, and we committed to tracking the project through completion.
As already mentioned, bolting the Coyote into the chassis was the easy part, in large part thanks to Maximum Motorsports' modular-swap K-member for '79-'95s. With the new 5.0 sharing the same motor mount configuration as earlier 4.6 modulars, the Maximum piece is a perfect perch. Brian found that installing the K-member with Maximum's ½-inch spacer kit allowed the Coyote to sit low enough to clear the stock hood, and coincidentally yielded a near perfect 2.5-degree driveshaft angle.
Using a Kenny Brown sway bar with SN95-style ends enabled Brian to remove the factory Fox sway-bar brackets on the front subframe, creating room to lift the entire K-frame/engine/headers/trans assembly into the chassis from below. Given the proper equipment, this technique is far easier and time efficient than working from the top. Said headers are BBK's Coyote swap long-tubes, and work like a charm.
The appeal of Coyote/Fox interbreeding is undeniable, and the result is a car that simply begs to be driven and enjoyed.
Alterations to the braking system provided clearance for the new DOHC 5.0, but Dennis clearly went above and beyond in this arena. Running big-by-large four-wheel Wilwoods isn't specifically required, though some kind of upgrade is surely prudent. No matter the choice, the stock Fox power-brake booster has to go; it would quite logically be replaced by a Hydraboost system in most situations. In this case however, Dennis wanted to go old school with full manual control, opting for a conversion kit from Maximum Motorsports.
A number of other hardware components are necessary to complete a Coyote swap on a Fox, some of which were accomplished with a Ron Davis aluminum radiator and S&R Performance power steering pump kit. Other companies offer a variety of swap products, and just during the course of this build through the winter of 2011-2012, a number of high-quality components have hit the market. Of course, the real challenges are in the electronics integration—the black arts, if you will—which is where Dennis believes Brian's work shines particularly bright.
An FRPP Control Pack is really just the beginning to getting the car up on its own feet, to which Brian added a custom SCT tune. The Control Pack did the trick, but was lacking in its ability to accommodate accessories such as A/C and cruise control due to its analog configuration; it's likely better oriented toward the vintage swap market. Brad and Brian figure this is an area that will be addressed by the aftermarket in time, and yet during our shoot, Brian had everything up and functioning as intended—save for the cruise control. He has a fix for that figured out too, but it's a matter of twisting the '92 free from Dennis's tight grip now that he's had a chance to spend some time behind the wheel.
Not to be overshadowed by the impressive engine swap, the remainder of the drivetrain is plenty impressive as well. If you're thinking overbuilt, let's just say Dennis has experienced enough parts breakage through the years to want things bulletproof. Besides, who knows if a supercharger might be in his future? To that end, backing the modern 5.0 is a Tremec Magnum six-speed manual with Centerforce DYAD dual disc clutch, and further arrears, a highly modified 9-inch.
We asked Dennis what he thought of the finished product shortly after his first extended drives last summer. "It's above and beyond my expectations. The power and balance is just phenomenal. It's simply not the same car I dropped off at the shop." After spending some time around the '92 ourselves, that's just the kind of response we anticipated.
The appeal of Coyote/Fox interbreeding is undeniable, and the result is a car that simply begs to be driven and enjoyed. Considering that Dennis has rolled just 1,000 miles a year on the odometer since purchasing his notch 17 years ago, we predict that rate of accumulation is about to accelerate—quickly!
Tech Specs: 1992 5.0 Lx
Engine and DrivetrainBlock: Stock Coyote aluminum, 3.629-in bore (M-6007-M50)
Crankshaft: Stock Coyote, 3.647-in
Rods: Stock Coyote
Pistons: Stock Coyote
Camshafts: Stock Coyote
Cylinder heads: Stock Coyote
Intake manifold: Stock Coyote
Fuel system: Aeromotive 340 Stealth w/ adjustable regulator, -6 lines, stock fuel rails, stock 32.8-lb/hr injectors, and 22-gallon Fuel Safe cell
Exhaust: BBK 13⁄4-in metallic-ceramic-coated swap full-length headers, BBK 3-in X-pipe with cats, and 21/2-in Magnaflow mufflers and stainless after-cat
Transmission: Tremec T56 Magnum six-speed w/ Centerforce DYAD twin-disc clutch, aluminum flywheel, Quick Time scattershield, and D&D sourced crossmember, and an Inland Empire 31⁄2-in aluminum driveshaft
Rearend: Ford 9-in housing modified by Dennis Chandler and Bill Scribner w/ big-bearing/Torino ends, Moser aluminum case, Moser 31-spline axles, Detroit Locker diff, and 3.89 gears
ElectronicsEngine management: Ford Racing Control Pack w/SCT tune
Ignition: Stock
Gauges: Stock
Suspension and ChassisFront suspension
K-member: Maximum Motorsports MMKM-2.1
A-arms: Maximum Motorsports
Struts: Edelbrock IAS
Springs: MM/Hypercoil coilover
Brakes: Wilwood 13-in six-piston w/ stainless lines, Wilwood combination proportioning valve (260-11179), and Maximum Motorsports manual brake conversion/master cylinder
Wheels: Enkei PF-01, 18x8.5-in
Tires: BFG KDW2, 235/40ZR-18
Rear suspension
Shocks: Edelbrock IAS
Springs: H&R
Control Arms: Edelbrock adjustable uppers w/ Steeda billet lowers
Brakes: Wilwood four-piston calipers w/ 12.19-in rotors
Wheels: Enkei PF-01, 18x10.5-in
Tires: BFG KDW2, 295/35ZR-18
Horse Sense: Owner Dennis Chandler was surprised by the improved front to rear weight balance of the car as a result of the Coyote swap. Formerly a 60/40 split in stock form, the car is now 56/44 thanks to the 444-pound Coyote, tubular front suspension, and trunk-mounted battery. Dennis says the resulting driving dynamic is like night and day.


text:
This approach is useful if the type library is not available at compile time or you want to allow methods to be called dynamically without knowing the interface pointer type at compile-time. It can be less efficient than using the approach in Calling Automation methods using a type library, but is often the simplest approach, especially if the Automation component was written to be called from a language like Visual Basic.
There are three kinds of Automation method, each of which is called using functions designed for the purpose.
form of invoke-dispatch-method can be used to call property setter methods.
form of invoke-dispatch-get-property.
To use these function, you need to specify a COM interface pointer for the i-dispatch interface, the method name and suitable arguments. The method name is given as a string or integer and the COM interface pointer is a foreign pointer of type com-interface. In all the functions, the arg s and value s are as specified in the Data conversion when calling Automation methods.
LispWorks COM/Automation User Guide and Reference Manual - 19 Dec 2011