How do millions of transistors talk with each other, also how we make shit tons of them? They are so small that they look like a foil..
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A transistor is the basic building block of a computer. You can think of it like a traffic light – it can decide whether electrical traffic flows one way, or another way – and you can tell it to change which way the traffic goes by applying electrical current along another separate wire.
The transistors in a computer are all connected to one another directly in a very specific pattern. They don’t “talk” to each other, but rather, electricity flows through them.
The key innovation is that manufacturers don’t make billions of separate transistors and then connect them up anymore. Instead, they take a single thin “wafer” of silicon – a material that conducts electricity really well – and then they shine a light on it with a predetermined pattern, just like projecting an image onto a wall. By coating the silicon with a chemical that reacts to the light, it “etches” the transistors right onto the silicon.
So essentially, all of the billions of transistors for a single computer chip can all be etched into the chip simultaneously.
The exact process for doing this is extremely complicated and requires large expensive factories, and in fact only a few companies in the whole world have the capability of making silicon chips with such a large number of tiny transistors.
I feel like we’re still missing an explanation involving “trapped electrons” and destructive readout, for USB drives
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