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 .