TITLE: Transistor NAME: Miroslav Hundak COUNTRY: Croatia EMAIL: dran@fly.cc.fer.hr WEBPAGE: http://fly.cc.fer.hr/~dran TOPIC: Great Engineering Achievements COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT. JPGFILE: npn.jpg 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.