The self-assembling computer chips of the future

Computers used to be as big as a room,

but now they fit in your pocket,

on your wrist,

and can even be implanted
inside of your body.

How cool is that?

And this has been enabled
by the miniaturization of transistors,

which are the tiny switches in the circuit
at the heart of our computers,

and it's been achieved
through decades of development

and breakthroughs
in science and engineering

and of billions of dollars of investment.

But it's given us
vast amounts of computing,

huge amounts of memory,

and the digital revolution
that we all experience and enjoy today.

But the bad new is,

we're about to hit a digital roadblock,

as the rate of miniaturization
of transistors is slowing down.

And this is happening
at exactly the same time

as our innovation in software
is continuing relentlessly

with artificial intelligence and big data,

and our devices regularly perform
facial recognition or augment our reality

or even drive cars down
our treacherous, chaotic roads.

It's amazing.

But if we don't keep up

with the appetite of our software,

we could reach a point
in the development of our technology

where the things that we
could do with software

could in fact be limited by our hardware.

And we've all experienced the frustration
of an old smartphone or tablet

grinding slowly to a halt over time

under the ever-increasing weight
of software updates and new features,

and it worked just fine
when we bought it not so long ago.

But the hungry software engineers

have eaten up all
the hardware capacity over time.

The semiconductor industry
is very well aware of this,

and is working on
all sorts of creative solutions,

such as going beyond transistors
to quantum computing

or even working with transistors
in alternative architectures

such as neural networks

to make more robust
and efficient circuits.

But these approaches
will take quite some time,

and we're really looking for a much more
immediate solution to this problem.

The reason why the rate of miniaturization
of transistors is slowing down

is due to the ever-increasing complexity
of the manufacturing process.

The transistor used to be
a big, bulky device,

until the invent of the integrated circuit

based on pure crystalline silicon wafers.

And after 50 years
of continuous development,

we can now achieve transistor
features dimensions

down to 10 nanometers.

You can fit more than
a billion transistors

in a single square millimeter of silicon.

And to put this into perspective,

a human hair is 100 microns across.

A red blood cell,
which is essentially invisible,

is eight microns across,

and you can place 12 across
the width of a human hair.

But a transistor, in comparison,
is much smaller,

at a tiny fraction of a micron across,

and you could place
more than 260 transistors

across a single red blood cell

or more than 3,000 across
the width of a human hair.

It really is incredible nanotechnology
in your pocket right now.