Like, yes, i know it’s electric and such. But I recently talked to an engineer and he, as I understand, said that there are still switches and other mechanics but microscopic inside CPUs and circuit boards.
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At the lowest level, there are transistors (e.g. MOSFETs) that amplify and switches the current of part of a circuit. To give you an intuitive understanding of a MOSFET, first imagine a node with two inputs and an output. The first input is called the source (holding some current) and the second input is the gate, which when “turned on”, amplifies the output. You can already see that this forms a component with “high” and “low” signals.
A flip-flip is the next building block that holds a bit of value (0 or 1) and is built using transistors.
These elements are then used to build silicon chips or integrated circuits and eventually the processor.
**Fun fact**: When people say Moore’s Law is slowing down, they mean that technology isn’t improving enough to get transistors smaller. The smaller the transistors, the more you can fit on the board. The more you fit on the board, the more parallelism and hence faster the processor.
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