- A typical car contains something like 30,000 discrete parts, if you count down to the smallest individual screw. By comparison, a typical microprocessor has around (to make the numbers work out conveniently) 3 billion transistors. That's a factor of a million more constituents. Bear in mind that essentially all of those transistors work, without fail, for a decade or more. (When was the last time you actually had a processor failure, rather than a power supply or hard drive issue?). Imagine taking a million cars, and claiming that they will all run, flawlessly, with no broken parts, for a decade.
- Parallel manufacturing is a wonderful thing. If you built the 3 billion transistors serially at a rate of one per second, it would take around 95 years to put together a processor.
- There is a famous study that proved that Kansas is actually flatter than a pancake. Perfect flatness would correspond with their flatness metric equalling 1, and they found that Kansas has a flatness of 0.9997. By that measure, a 300 mm silicon wafer used to fabricate chips would have a flatness on the order of 1 - (30 nm/300mm) = 1 - 10-7. If your dining room table was that flat, the typical height of a surface defect would be well under the wavelength of visible light. If Kansas was that flat, the tallest feature in the state would be a few cm high.
- The worst silicon purity acceptable for Si electronics processing is around 0.1 parts per billion. That means that a single impurity atom in such silicon is more rare than, well, you as a member of the population of the earth.
- We have the ability to position particular devices with (roughly) few nm precision and accuracy on a processor of cm scale. That's equivalent to being able to place an item on your desk in a particular place to within about 1/50th the diameter of a human hair.
A blog about condensed matter and nanoscale physics. Why should high energy and astro folks have all the fun?
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Quantitatively, how amazing are modern electronics technologies and materials?
I've talked before about how condensed matter/materials physics/engineering is so ubiquitous that it somehow fades into the background, and people don't appreciate how truly wondrous it is. I thought I'd compile a few stats to try and drive this home.
I'm sure that a Toyota has a few microprocessors, so it'll have more parts than your typical microprocessor... But you already knew you were cheating with that one ;-)
ReplyDeleteFantastic post!
ReplyDeleteShowed it to my parents; they were impressed. Good advertisement for condensed matter physics/engineering!