A journey down nine powers of ten

The Scale of a Transistor

Start at an iPod you can hold. Scroll, and the world shrinks ten times with every step — past a grain of rice, an ant, a human hair, a red blood cell, a virus — until you reach a switch ~17 nm wide, carved billions of times over into a fingernail of silicon.

Scroll to shrink

Sunglasses14 cm

iPod Classic10.3 cm

First transistor · 194726 mm

US quarter24 mm

Grain of rice8 mm

Carebara ant1 mm

Grain of salt0.5 mm

Tardigrade0.5 mm

Human hair100 µm

White blood cell10 µm

Red blood cell8 µm

E. coli2 µm

Influenza virus100 nm

First iPod transistor · 2001 · iPod180 nm

First Wii transistor · 2006 · Wii65 nm

Hemoglobin6.5 nm

Modern transistor · today~17 nm

DNA helix2 nm

Glucose molecule0.8 nm

1meter

1 grid square ≈
about 10 across a metre
near: ·

keep scrolling ↓

Why they kept shrinking

Every two years, twice as many.

Making transistors smaller let engineers roughly doublethe number packed onto a single chip about every two years. Intel's first microprocessor held 2,300of them in 1971. Apple's M3 Ultra holds 184 billion.

Plotted on a logarithmic axis, five decades of exponential growth fall almost onto a straight line. You've heard its name.

Moore's Law

Number of transistors on microchips

Source: OurWorldInData.org

The payoff in your pocket

100,000,000×

Your phone is roughly a hundred million times faster than the computer that guided Apollo to the Moon — because we learned to carve a switch smaller than a virus.

1969 · Apollo Guidance Computer

~12,300 transistors

clock ~2 MHz

2025 · Apple A19 Pro (phone)

tens of billions

clock ~4 GHz

But — a wall

A transistor is only a switch.

At its heart, every transistor just turns a current on or off. Shrink it much further and quantum physics blurs that line: electrons start to tunnel through when the switch is supposed to be closed, and we lose control of on and off.

State: blocking — no current flows. Flip the gate to see the channel conduct.

So instead of smaller…

They started stacking up.

If you can't spread more transistors side by side, build upward— like trading single-storey houses for apartment towers. More layers, more density… and a lot more heat to carry away. That's the frontier now.