Seventy-five years is a long time. So much so that most of us don’t remember a time before the transistor, a ubiquitous element in any modern electronic device.
The transistor would never have become so useful and ubiquitous if the semiconductor industry hadn’t managed to make it small and cheap.
The most obvious change in transistor technology over the past 75 years has been the quantity we can manufacture🇧🇷 Downsizing the device was a huge and successful effort, but size isn’t the only feature engineers have been tweaking.
In 1947, there was only one transistor. According to TechInsight predictions, the semiconductor industry is on track to produce nearly 2 billion trillion (10²¹) devices this year. That’s more transistors than were manufactured cumulatively in all the years prior to 2017.
Behind this almost inconceivable number is the continued decline in the price of a transistor as engineers learn to cram more and more into the same area of silicon.
The density of transistors in logic circuits has multiplied by more than 600,000 since 1971🇧🇷 To reduce the size of transistors, it is necessary to use shorter wavelengths, such as extreme ultraviolet, and other lithography techniques to reduce the gap between transistor gates and between metallic interconnections.
In the future, what counts is the third dimension, in which the transistors will be built on top of each other. This trend has been around for over a decade in flash memory, but it’s still the future of logic.