Many people giving talks had complained about the current germanium transistors -- they had a bad habit of not working at high temperatures. Silicon, since it's right above germanium on the ...

The transistors were not that good even when they did work. The first transistors were germanium which has high leakage and worse thermal properties than silicon. Early transistors were subject to ...

Germanium is very similar to silicon, but when one layer is grown on top of the other to form the base of the transistor, the resulting transistor can switch faster and yield higher performance.