For decades, engineers have been working to create smaller and smaller transistors to fit ever-larger numbers of them onto computer chips, all in the name of greater processing power. Now, in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), that effort has turned into an all-out race.
So how small can a transistor actually get? And is smaller even still the goal?
To understand the answer, first you need to know what a transistor is.
"If you take a computer or your mobile phone and you were to pry it open, you will see that there is a printed circuit board," Suman Datta, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech, told Live Science.
On that circuit board are small, rectangular objects called chips, and inside each chip is a tiny piece of silicon. "And in that silicon, if you zoom in like a million times … maybe, if you're lucky, you will start seeing these tiny switches or transistors sitting etched into that piece of silicon," Datta said.
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