If you go back far enough—say to 40 or 60 no—then the measure is of the smallest resolvable feature size. What’s important, though, to feature size, is transist

If you go back far enough—say to 40 or 60 no—then the measure is of the smallest resolvable feature size. What’s important, though, to feature size, is transistor & wire pitch density. It turns out that 60nm transistors & wires have a lot of ‘extra’ room between them. What’s been mostly shrinking (increasing?) is density and not absolute feature size. That’s why IBM’s smallest AFM-assembled gate is still 5 or 6 orders of magnitude smaller than (at the time) a 14nm-scale gate.