![]() ![]() Well-designed and manufactured Ge devices leak a microamp or two. Modern Si devices often leak in the pico amps range (or maybe a nanoamp). Almost all of the leakage of older Ge devices (AC, NKT, etc) is associated with design and manufacture. However, this information might make people think that Si intrinsically leaks 0.1 uA and Ge leaks 100 uA. There seem to be ample supplies of "new" Ge parts, though whether freshly-made or found in warehouses is hard to know.Īgain, RG is right on the money. I don't doubt that Ge foundries exist here and there around the world, not busy but not yet cut up for scrap. That company seems to have moved totally into opto-electronics and other more sophisticated uses of Ge compounds. Probably making spares for B-52 bomb-door motors and other legacy hardware. Within the last decade huge Ge power transistors were still in production in Florida. Ge can be made for VERY high current, because it costs less and has lower voltage. There was a loooong tail of specialized Ge parts. So obviously most small Ge production stopped in the 1960s. By 1972, IIRC, even these holes were mostly filled with Si parts. The last small Ge were cheap transistor radios and such. The period 1962 to 1969 saw Ge go away and Si dominate. Once everybody was making Si parts, competition drove prices down. The fallout from tight-spec production came on the market for less demanding applications. These were produced in HUGE numbers for high-buck computer and instrumentation uses. Along this path they also learned to purify Silicon to a useful degree, and make high-temperature transistors. Better Ge devices were very good at room temperature. So Bell Labs, Fairchild, IBM, Texas Instruments, and a lot of others worked on the purification problem. Also there were instrumentation uses (notably oil-wells) where heat made leaky Ge useless. ![]() But low-purity Ge parts weren't a ton better. The advantages of a lower-power and potentially longer-life transistor were huge. Big heat, and 2,000 tubes at average 10,000-hour life means daily crashes. The telephone company had millions of mechanical relays, needed more, but with less wear and maintenance. However for battery uses it is SO much better than a tube that bad Ge parts were widely used. Silicon requires MUCH better refining to make anything useful.Ī low-purity Ge transistor is pretty bad. You can make "a transistor" with commercial Germanium and one re-refining. Soon after better-performing Silicon parts got to tolerable price. When did they stop making Ge Transistors? ![]()
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