The semiconductor integrated circuit—the computer chip—is the most sophisticated mechanism ever created by humankind. This delicate wafer underpins technological innovation and the existence of Silicon Valley itself. The fabrication of any single modern chip is more complex than the Manhattan Project, and the world’s semiconductor companies have shipped some three trillion of these chips since 1980. Once an expensive novelty found only in the most powerful computers, integrated circuits are today embedded in every corner of human life.
As they’ve become commonplace, computer chips have accelerated the pace of change in society to a speed never before known in human history. Their ubiquity was forecast in 1965 by Moore’s law, named for the chip pioneer Gordon Moore, who discovered that the number of transistors on a chip doubled every two years, a trend that may continue well into this century (and perhaps even the next). This pace serves as the metronome of our lives, transforming human existence in ways we can’t imagine. The explosion of artificial intelligence is just the latest hint of what is to come—perhaps even conscious machines and the greatest revolution in the human story.
This article appears in Issue 30 of Alta Journal.
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What is remarkable about the computer chip is that, for all its complexity, it arises from an elemental, almost mythical, level of creation: just silicon sand, fire, and a little bit of metal. The first silicon chip was produced in a Mountain View laboratory during the late 1950s at the nexus of solid-state electronics (the transistor) and the adoption of photolithography from the printing industry (the planar process). With this method, transistors could be printed in growing numbers flat on a sheet of glass, their designs etched with acid and the connections between the transistors formed with metal. The first proof of the integrated circuit was just a small bull’s-eye transistor made of glass and metal. Today, 66 years later, the most powerful integrated circuit is an AI processor from Nvidia that contains 208 billion transistors.
So elaborate is this latest generation of chips that it almost defies analogy, much less logic. The total number of transistors fabricated today? At least 20 trillion per second, hundreds of quintillions per year. That’s more than the estimated number of grains of sand on the world’s beaches. And as the features on each of those chips continue to be miniaturized—currently, they are just three nanometers (one nanometer is a billionth of a meter, 1/60,000 of the width of a human hair)—even those analogues won’t be enough to describe the innovation taking place.
At the current rate of Moore’s law, the number of transistors fabricated in the history of the integrated circuit will, in our lifetimes, approach the estimated number of stars in the known universe. It is beyond human imagination, yet the computer chip is very much the supreme product of that same human imagination. And its ultimate form is yet to come.•
A veteran newspaper reporter and columnist, magazine editor, and entrepreneur, Michael S Malone is the author or coauthor of more than twenty award-winning books, notably, the seminal Silicon Valley history The Big Score, the bestselling The Virtual Corporation, Bill & Dave, and The Intel Trinity. He currently hosts the podcast The Silicon Insider and is Dean’s Executive Professor at Santa Clara University.
