The blog for aspiring & established filmmakers of independent films. by ted hope.

What is it, really? The Transistor


Transistors make up silicon chips.  But what are they, really?  This is one of those questions that had the stink of unknowing with it.  The nose did not know.  Luckily, we found this nifty Explain-It-All Chart on the BBC News site in article about the founder of Intel, the big chip manufacturer.Transistors are basic electronic switches found in silicon chips

  • Each transistor can be switched on or off, representing a “1” or “0”, known as binary code
  • All computation is done using different combinations of these two outputs to do calculations
  • The number of transistors on a chip determine its speed
  • Modern chips contain millions of transistors allowing them to execute millions of calculations per second
  • The tiny devices consist of a source, drain and gate
  • A voltage applied to the gate and drain turns the device on
  • Removing the gate voltage switches it off again

Pretty simple, right? And they’ve been putting more and more of those transistors on chips at an incredible rate, making our computers go faster and faster.

Pretty neat, right? Well, we thought so. Maybe not as neat as a fast car, but neat nonetheless.

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Hope offers his unique perspective on how to make movies while keeping your integrity intact and how to create a sustainable business enterprise out of that art while staying true to yourself.

Meet Ted

Ted Hope is a “holistic film producer”: he aims to be there from the beginning and then forever after, involved in every aspect of a film’s life cycle and ecosystem, as committed to engineering serendipity as preventing problems, as obsessed with lifting the good into the great, as he is…

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