Aren’t transistors physical things? How is it possible to manufacture billions, especially within the small size of a computer chip?
I saw the Apple m2 chip has 20 billion transistors – it just seems incomprehensible that that many can be manufactured.. they could be microscopic, but 20 billion is still an absurd number
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they are really really small. In most computers, a transistor is only about 70 ATOMS wide, or about 5 nanometers. at that scale, a 2d plane of transistors that is only 1 square millimeter would hold about 40 billion transistors (assuming they are square). naturally you cant pack them that tight in the real world.
the way we manufacture this is literally using magic crystals, alchemy, and sunlight. UV light is shone through a slide like old slide projectors would use. this slide contains a pattern for a single layer of the chip. this projection of a pattern is then fed backwards through what is effectively a microscope which makes the whole design the size of a single area of a single chip. This is then shone into a UV sensitive coating on a silicon crystal and causes take on the microscopic pattern special “doping” chemicals are then spread over the chip and they soak through into the silicon where the coating is missing changing the properties of the silicon crystal. Rinse and repeat with a new projector pattern. This builds up microscopic layers 1 layer at a time.
here is a good indepth video on the whole process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ehSCWoaOqQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBYHwRXmEhY
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