3 ms·

We are butting up on the physical limit, but to be fair, that’s what people have been saying for over a decade, and we keep going. According to Wolfram Alpha,

We are butting up on the physical limit, but to be fair, that’s what people have been saying for over a decade, and we keep going. According to Wolfram Alpha, 5 nanometers is ~23 silicon atoms across (~2.2 Å each). But that’s also assuming they’re actually fabricating 5 nm gates - which they’re not.

anfilt 6y ago
Like if you look at the rate of down scaling it has slowed some. It's also not the size of the whole transistor it's the size/thickness of the N, P and Insulator layers that will limiting factor in FET style transistors. The oxide/insulator thickness on modern process is pretty insane. For instance for the intel 14nm++ the silicon nitride and silicon oxide layers seem to 4 to 5nm thick. -Edit- For instance here is 2 fins for from the intel 14nm++. The grains/spheres you see this image are the atoms. Some parts of the a modern transistors are even smaller than process number may let you know. https://imgur.com/a/hgeSOVV https://imgur.com/a/hgeSOVV