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Show HN: I made some transistor animations (brandonli.net)
151 points by stunningllama 12 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 19 comments
Hi HN, I made some animations of the most important kinds of transistors using my semiconductor simulation, details of which are on the page. I tried to make the visuals as realistic as possible while also aiming for clarity. If you want to go beyond the charge carriers and look at, for example, the electric field, you can do so in the simulation software. The desktop software also has less common devices like IBGTs and SCRs that have similar animations.

The last thread about my software was posted here about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43942279

 help



Very cool!

Very cool, that's super useful for someone just getting started with electrical engineering.

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


Oh, yes. I updated the page so the animations are now under the CC-BY license. Glad to hear you like them!

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.

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.

Has anyone made a similar resource for zero-to-hero FPGA programming?

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?


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).

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.

This would have been invaluable when I did my EEE degree many years ago. I use to draw the charge carries instead.

That's really cool. I am again planning to focus more on maths n physics...Hope it helps along..thanks

- Headings w/ id= attr and a Table of Contents?

- > model vortices in superconductors or the Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43955906

- Nils Berglund fluid and particle sim videos: https://youtube.com/@nilsberglund

- The other day I tried having a model implement Fedi's superfluid quantum gravity for a black hole simulation in JS and then given also EHT data. I asked it to implement with R3F ReactThreeFiber and Drei (ThreeJS) and NextJS with OpenNext for the GUI and framework. I haven't yet upgraded to WASM optimization for the nonlinear fluid parts. There are parameter combinations that result in mirror-like rejection.

- (FWIU CloudFlare AI rewrote significant parts of NextJS this past year and there's OpenNext to get the full benefits of nextjs on any hosting platform)

- Another neat one to model particles of: LightSlinger antennas

- Gravity from QED, but also MHD Magnetohydrodynamics, and SQR Superfluid Quantum Relativity with a dilatant superfluid to explain why c


Additional things to model with an electron simulator or a particle simulator; concept sustainable computing materials from my sustainablefactory project:

- Electrons in laser-induced Graphene on Silicon Carbide

- Electrons in Boronated Lignin-Vitrimer

- Photons in Nitrogenated Lignin-Vitrimer (at cryogenic temperatures)

- Electrons in Oxidized Carbon Nanotubes (in Laser-ablated grooves in Nitrogenated Lignin-Vitrimer) after Laser Compression Shock bonds and deoxidizes them

- Boron Nanotubes; Boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs)

- Boron instead of Phosphorous for P-type doping

- Boron instead of Gallium in GaN


I wonder how difficult it would be to convert these to 3D

Not too difficult. Stay tuned for the 3D version.

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...

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.


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.



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