EMAIL: dran@fly.cc.fer.hr
NAME: Miroslav Hundak
TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
TITLE: Transistor
COUNTRY: Croatia
WEBPAGE: http://fly.cc.fer.hr/~dran
RENDERER USED: POV-Ray 3.1
TOOLS USED: Rhinoceros Beta
RENDER TIME: app. 16 hours
HARDWARE USED: P100/32

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

Transistor of NPN-type manufactured in planar technology, the way you
would see it if you could see inside a classic transistor element.
These little thingies are the building bricks for the foundations of
all modern electronic devices. Maybe not the greatest engineering
achievement, but one of the greatest and most significant.
If transistors weren't invented, it would be impossible for anyone
to see this image, or read this text, for obvious reasons.

The red metal represents p and p+ semiconductor layer, and the blue
metal represents the n and n+ semiconductor layer. The gray is
poly-Silicium layer between metal layer on top (3 electrodes out of
which the golden wires come out to make the outside contacts) and
semiconducting layers below. Transparent layers have the function of
isolating the layers of semiconductors mutualy and metal layers
mutualy and are made of Silicium-Di-Oxide which is basically
common glass. Thin green layer is Si3Ni4, also has the role of
isolation, however it has better dielectric properties than SiO2.

If you look carefully, you could see single letter bored into each
metal electrode's side (front), where C stands for Colector, B for
Base and E for Emiter. If you are half litterate in electronics you
should know what those are.


DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED:

I took the picture of hypothetical transistor made in planar
technology from my study book and modeled it in Rhinocerus beta
one day and exported it in POV format. The sole reason for
which I had not included source files is that they are over
45MB in size, due to Rhino's export in triangles (mesh objects).
For that reason parsing lasted over 5 minutes (5'09'').
I should have known better than to put three spot lights, because
rendering lasted far too long for my taste (see RENDER TIME).

Everything was done over period of only three days, and it shows.
Considering I started working on it only four days before
deadline it turned out relatively well.