Show HN: I made some transistor animations

(brandonli.net)

126 points | by stunningllama 1 day ago

11 comments

  • amingilani 3 hours ago
    Would you consider releasing these under a permissive license?

    I run a (Canadian) ham radio training site[0] and would love to put them in the lessons. With attribution of course.

    Edit: Oh gosh, your whole site is full of wonderful illustrations. My niece might finally get her license with these :)

    [0]: https://clares.ca

    • stunningllama 30 minutes ago
      Oh, yes. I updated the page so the animations are now under the CC-BY license. Glad to hear you like them!
  • customguy 6 hours ago
    Ohhh. I have no real knowledge of electricity or electronics, but I know transistors are very fundamental so if you squint a bit, you might say this is what we set in motion when we program, or even just use a computer! Or at least some of it. Not knowing enough to benefit from it I learned nothing, and don't regret a second of that.
    • smnplk 1 minute ago
      You can google for "From nand to tetris" or get the book Digital Design and Computer Architecture by Harris to get the idea of how these machines work.
  • danilor 1 hour ago
    Cool!

    I wonder how different those are to real simulations! Do they treat electrons as point-like, or it's all computation on the fields?

    • stunningllama 22 minutes ago
      The simulation does calculations on the fields only, so it keeps track of the average electron and hole density at each point in space. There is, however, a one-to-one correspondence between the behavior of the fields and the motion of individual particles, which is what makes these animations possible. What I mean by this is the diffusion equation is satisfied by the probability density of a particle undergoing a random walk. So given an electron density that obeys the diffusion-drift equations we can make dots undergo a random walk with drift that turns out to match the given density function (the result is the second set of animations).
  • 01jonny01 3 hours ago
    This would have been invaluable when I did my EEE degree many years ago. I use to draw the charge carries instead.
  • lefra 5 hours ago
    Thanks, I have an EE education, but I didn't really understood what charges were doing in a BJT. I can use them and apply the formulas, but I never really "grokked" them. This makes it clearer.
  • Mohiuddin7 4 hours ago
    That's really cool. I am again planning to focus more on maths n physics...Hope it helps along..thanks
  • p1esk 4 hours ago
    I wonder how difficult it would be to convert these to 3D
  • IshKebab 4 hours ago
    This is really cool. It would have made understanding these so much easier when I was learning.

    One minor suggestion - show the voltages in all the animations.

  • lloydatkinson 4 hours ago
    This is one of the coolest animation/diagrams I've ever seen, I wish they had them when I did this at uni. It sure beats whiteboards with scribbles and arrows all over it...
  • himata4113 6 hours ago
    it kind of looks unrealistic that there's so little flow, but I guess that makes sense for micro-sized transistors, larger ones that can handle several amps at high voltage should behave differently and would be a rather interesting comparison.