IC Fabrication
By Rutwik Pandit, SE ETRX
When I was in 5th standard, I would play a lot of GTA on my PC and the graphics looked absolutely amazing for the time. Today I can play the same game on my phone with the same graphics without even connecting it to a charger. We have seen incredible gains in our computational power. Much of our technological progress has come from reducing the advancements in semiconductor fabrication.
Imagine being given a piece of paper and being told to write as much as you can on it, the obvious solution would be to write as minutely as you can.
Similarly for any semiconductor device, a transistor is a basic building block and the size of a transistor on a silicon wafer is termed its process node size. The size of the transistor that can be fabricated on the chip is roughly 10nm-14nm.
The smaller a transistor is, the lesser is its power consumption. The more transistors you can fit on a piece of silicon, the faster it is and more efficient.
There are 3 major players in the semiconductor manufacturing industry 1. Intel 2. TSMC 3. Global Foundries
Intel has been the king of the hill for a long period of time, but it ' s slipping and there is a major challenge incoming and which is going to slow down the rate of technological progress and that is Physics. As the transistors get smaller, they tend to run into weird quantum effects.