Why are the capacitors so big, while the transistors are tiny?
In: Technology
They are very different kinds of devices.
All a transistor (in a computer) is doing is controlling the flow of a tiny current. This doesn’t need the transistor to be large, in fact it can be very small and still do its job brilliantly. However if we look at transistors that are designed to deal with bigger currents (inside a power supply for example), they are larger as they need more material to not be destroyed by the larger currents.
Capacitors are essentially two conductive sheets very close together. The capacitance is directly related to the electric field within the capacitor. To increase the strength of the electric field we can move the sheets closer, make the sheets bigger, or put a better dielectric (a material) between the two. If we have reached the limit of how close they can get, and already have the best material between them, then all we can do is make the sheets bigger. This means that we have to make the capacitor itself larger.
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