Essential Guide to Semiconductors, The

Ready For the Metal Round

Although chips are made of many layers, the transistors are all near the bottom. The upper layers are for the metal connecting wires. That means the size of a chip is determined mostly by the number of transistors it has, not by the amount of wiring it requires. That's what pushes semiconductor manufacturers to constantly shrink the size of their transistors: The smaller the transistor, the smaller the chip (or the more transistors you can fit on a same-sized chip). The smaller the chip, the more you can fit on a wafer. The more chips on a wafer, the more you can sell for the same amount of work. Moore's Law is just good old capitalism at work.

After the transistors are built up on our chip, it will go through the same ...