A video that has been making the rounds online takes viewers on an amazing tour inside the tiny world of a smartphone chip. To show viewers how tiny modern transistors have grown, the video dramatically closes in on the chip.
The video provides an overview of the area of nanoscale engineering despite its lack of reality. It offers an impressive visual depiction of the scope and intricacy of modern microchip manufacturing.
One of the most remarkable feats of modern technology is the sheer number of transistors packed into devices like Apple’s A17 Pro system-on-a-chip, used in the iPhone 15. Daniel Lemire, a computer science professor at the University of Quebec, points out, that this chip contains around 19 billion transistors, a number that continues to double approximately every 2.5 years. The entire chip, according to TechInsights, measures just 17.0 x 12.87 x 0.91 mm—smaller than a postage stamp.
This impressive feat of engineering is accomplished using a “3 nanometer process” by Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC. While the term “3 nanometers” has evolved more into a marketing label, the actual FinFET transistors within the chip have dimensions closer to 6 nanometers. To put this into perspective, a hydrogen atom is about one-tenth of a nanometer in diameter, meaning you could theoretically fit 60 hydrogen atoms across the width of a single transistor gate.
The manufacturing process for microchips is highly complex. Up to 80 layers of wiring interconnects, arranged both vertically and horizontally, create each chip layer by layer, joining thousands of small components. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, which exposes a photoresist layer to UV light through a stencil, is one of the several processes in the process that produce nanowires. Etching and copper deposition are the next steps. The entire process, which may take three months to finish, is done with extreme precision; a single mistake or dust particle contamination could require a restart.
Microchip technology has advanced to the point that computer power has increased exponentially, all the while consuming less energy and becoming smaller. This advancement is clear when contrasting modern technology with supercomputers from the past. Introduced in 1976, the CRAY-1 supercomputer was a massive machine that weighed 5.5 tonnes, used 115 kW of electricity, and cost $7.9 million.
On the other hand, the 2023 release of the iPhone 15 Pro, a pocket-sized powerhouse with a fraction of the CRAY-1’s power consumption, can perform nearly 13,000 times more operations per second.