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 essentially printed. They’re not “assembled” mechanically. A silicon wafer has a large block of silicon circuits “projected” onto it and developed with special chemicals in extremely complicated and expensive photolithography machines. The wafer then contains a mass number of completed chips, some of which may be defective. They break the wafer up into individual chips to be sold and sell the defective chips as lower powered units by disabling defective areas of the chip.
The transistors are not made one at a time. They’re made by essentially photocopying a master pattern onto a silicon wafer, and then using the pattern on the wafer to spray it with the dopants and other materials needed to turn silicon into transistors. The master pattern has all of the billions of transistors on it, and they spray the whole wafer at once instead of spraying each individual transistor one at a time. Then you repeat the process to physically etch the silicon into the shape you want and apply the films and metals that need to be connected to the silicon transistor.
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