adrian_b's explanation is pretty good explanation of what I'm saying. To expand on that: you cannot pack transistors side-by-side without moving to global custo

adrian_b's explanation is pretty good explanation of what I'm saying. To expand on that: you cannot pack transistors side-by-side without moving to global custom poly. The result is that there's a large amount of "technically not space for the transistor, but space required for the transistor to work" stuff around the transistor. The result is that a 2nm process transistors is on the order of 10s of millions of atoms. Source: I work with the latest nodes. Here's a Fermi estimate: the M1 is ~16 billion transistors; assume it is 1 cm^2. That gives (10^7)^2 nm^2 / 10^10 transistors, which is ~10^4 nm^2/transistor. Assume the transistor is ~50nm high, which gives ~5x10^5 nm^3/transistor. There are ~100 SI atoms/nm^3, which gives a volume of ~5x10^7 SI/transistor.