Britannica
Sources used in this answer
- Mooreās law
- integrated circuit
- integrated circuit - Photolithography
- transistor - Transistors and Mooreās law
- nanotechnology - Top-down approach
- electronics - Fabrication of semiconductors
- integrated circuit - Building layers
- semiconductor device - Metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors
- transistor - Silicon transistors
How can one integrated circuit contain hundreds of thousands of transistors?
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electronics
The development of screen-printable electronic ink for flexible electronics.
An integrated circuit (IC) can contain hundreds of thousands of transistors primarily because of the dramatic, continuous reduction in the physical size of individual transistors over the decades. While early transistors were measured in millimeters, modern features are often measured in tens of nanometersāa reduction factor exceeding 100,000.12
This high density is achieved through several key engineering advancements:
- Miniaturization and Scaling: The metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) became the dominant device for large-scale integration because it is easily scaled down to smaller dimensions, consumes less power, and features a relatively simple manufacturing process.3
- Photolithography: Engineers use photolithography to pattern microscopic circuits onto a silicon substrate. By using masks and light (including ultraviolet radiation), they can etch extremely precise, complex patterns for thousands of components simultaneously.456
- Layered Fabrication: ICs are built as monolithic units by depositing, etching, and modifying multiple thin layers (often 30 or more) on a single piece of semiconductor material. This allows for the integration of transistors, diodes, resistors, and capacitors along with their necessary interconnections on a single chip.76