[jjoonathan]

I think the -6V connection was simply that the LM383 designers were able to trivially integrate something the automotive industry considered non-trivial due to historical reliance on discrete processes and "build it sturdy" engineering. Nowadays chips are so highly integrated, so cheap, and so ubiquitous that it's hard to imagine dealing with messy power any other way, but it wasn't always so.

I have vague intuition that p-type silicon has lower mobility and worse ohmic-junction performance than n-type silicon. A real semiconductor engineer should verify, but I believe the core of the dig is that the low performance acts like intrinsic protection: the PNPs simply couldn't conduct enough current to destroy themselves, at least not in the multitude of spectacular fashions as the NPNs.

[mbell]

Electrons are the majority charge carriers for NPN vs holes in PNP which does mean that NPN transistors are faster, they also are usually a _bit_ better than PNP in other specs (beta, etc).

However I don't think this was the main part of the joke, rather it's that lateral transistors are _way_ worse in pretty much every conceivable metric than vertical transistors save two - they are hard to destroy and cheap. So add 'lateral' to 'PNP' and you basically have 'worst possible transistor', so bad that you can't kill it.

[jjoonathan]

Thanks for clarifying. I chalked up the difference between 'a bit' and 'can't kill it' to mitigations that have happened since the LM383 was designed but now that I'm reading up on lateral transistors it looks like you're almost certainly right.