We swipe, we tap, we scroll and click, but rarely do we pause to think about what goes on in the maze of electronics beneath our fingertips. But next time you are marveling at the computer hardware in your hands spare a thought for the tiny transistors in our computer chips. Without them all our modern gizmos wouldn't work.
"I think transistors really are the unsung heroes of the information age," says Kaizad Mistry, vice president at the world's leading chip maker, Intel. "These tiny little switches ... these are the things that our computers, our servers, our smartphones and laptops (depend on)."
Since Intel introduced the first commercial microprocessor in 1971, all chip manufacturers have been striving to increase processor speeds by cramming more and more transistors -- the tiny switches that control electrical signals -- onto surfaces no bigger than the size of a fingernail.
Intel's landmark 4004 chip contained 2,300 transistors, each measuring a few micrometers (a millionth of a meter) across. Today, the most advanced silicon chips contain billions of nano-sized switches controlling the flow of electrical currents. Measuring one billionth of a meter across, objects at the nanoscale are almost impossible to imagine.
Imagine that a marble measured one nanometer across, says the U.S. government's National Nanotechnology Initiative by way of comparison. If it did, then a meter would be equal to the diameter of the Earth.
"Nanoscale devices are important because our societies have gone crazy about information," says professor Peter J. Bentley from University College London and author of "Digitized: The science of computers and how it shapes our world.
"The amount of data produced and consumed every day is reaching unthinkable levels, and it increases every day. But that data has to be stored somewhere, and processed by something," Bentley told CNN via email.
"So basically, we either keep getting smaller so that we can store and process more information in the same small size for about the same power cost ... or we will have to start rationing data usage per person because the computing power needed will eventually use more energy than the planet can support," he added.
In a bid to keep pace with Moore's Law -- Intel founder Gordon E. Moore's assertion that the number of transistors on a chip should double roughly every two years -- Intel have developed new "3-D" or "Tri-Gate" transistors, each one measuring 22 namometers across.
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