How Many Nanometers in a Micron?

It's hard to overhear any discussion of chip manufacturing for more than a few minutes without hearing about microns or nanometers. (Okay, it's hard to listen to any discussion of chip manufacturing at all, but that's not the issue here.) These two terms describe exactly how small the transistors and metal wires on a chip are. For clean room workers and manufacturing technicians, microns and nanometers are everything.

Both terms are simply measurements. In fact, they're measurements of the same thing. One micron is exactly one one-millionth of a meter (0.000001 meter). For fans of English measurement, that's about 25,000 microns to the inch (see Figure 4.10). For comparison, a human hair is about 50 microns thick, ...

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