20 Billion transistors? What is a transistor in an iPad: what does one look like and how is it made?

[Tozovac]

Looking at the comparison between iPads, the number of transistors in an iPad continually blows my mind.

Not being a computer hardware, design engineer, even with some Google searching I don’t have a good feel for exactly what one of those 20 billion transistors looks like. And how do 1000 of them next to each other look like? Can anyone knowledgeable chime in?

The fact that 20 billion of anything costs less than $1200 kind of blows my mind.

 

[DeltaMac]

You might watch one of the videos that shows how a CPU is manufactured, showing the multiple layers that are part of the process, along with perhaps a show of how miniscule all the devices are.

Newsroom Home

Intel Newsroom home page

newsroom.intel.com

You would need a powerful electron microscope, and even then, a single device is nearing the scale of individual atoms. That multi-layer process makes use of photo-etching, etc. on such a tiny device. Billions of devices can be in an area the size of a fingernail. You would be hard-pressed to see a single device, when the process puts those devices into as many as 30 layers on the chip.

 

[Tozovac]

You might watch one of the videos that shows how a CPU is manufactured, showing the multiple layers that are part of the process, along with perhaps a show of how miniscule all the devices are.

Newsroom Home

Intel Newsroom home page

newsroom.intel.com

You would need a powerful electron microscope, and even then, a single device is nearing the scale of individual atoms. That multi-layer process makes use of photo-etching, etc. on such a tiny device. Billions of devices can be in an area the size of a fingernail. You would be hard-pressed to see a single device, when the process puts those devices into as many as 30 layers on the chip.

Thx I looked but didn’t find this one. I’ll watch b4 bed and it’ll probably give me too much to think about and I’ll be stuck awake !