The State of the Transistor in 3 Charts

In 1947, there was only a single transistor. According to TechInsight’s forecast, the semiconductor marketplace is on observe to generate pretty much 2 billion trillion (1021) products this 12 months. Which is far more transistors than ended up cumulatively produced in all the yrs prior to 2017. Powering that scarcely conceivable variety is the continued reduction in the cost of a transistor, as engineers have uncovered to integrate much more and far more of them into the identical spot of silicon.

Scaling down transistors in the 2D area of the aircraft of the silicon has been a smashing achievement: Transistor density in logic circuits has greater extra than 600,000-fold since 1971. Minimizing transistor dimensions requires employing shorter wavelengths of mild, this sort of as excessive ultraviolet, and other lithography tricks to shrink the place concerning transistor gates and among metallic interconnects. Likely forward, it is the third dimension, the place transistors will be crafted atop one yet another, that counts. This development is additional than a 10 years aged in flash memory, but it’s continue to in the future for logic (see “Taking Moore’s Law to New Heights.”)

Maybe the crowning accomplishment of all this effort and hard work is the potential to combine millions, even billions, of transistors into some of the most complex units on the world: CPUs. Here’s a look at some of the superior details along the way.

This article appears in the December 2022 print challenge as “The State of the Transistor.”