Our lives are surrounded by semiconductors.
Look up from this page for a second. The alarm that woke you, the light above your head, the card that opened the ticket gate, the train that carried you — every one of them was thinking with a sliver of semiconductor smaller than your fingernail. You chose none of them. They arrived quietly, one device at a time, until an ordinary Tuesday morning contained more computers than the entire Apollo programme. So this book starts there: not with physics, but with the morning you have already lived through.
- Your phone
One handset holds dozens of separate chips: the main processor, the radios, the camera, the power managers, the memory.
- The LED bulb
The light comes straight out of a semiconductor junction. There is no hot wire inside at all.
- The train
Power devices chop the electricity thousands of times a second to set how fast the motor turns.
- 1Your phone — One handset holds dozens of separate chips: the main processor, the radios, the camera, the power managers, the memory.
- 2The LED bulb — The light comes straight out of a semiconductor junction. There is no hot wire inside at all.
- 3The train — Power devices chop the electricity thousands of times a second to set how fast the motor turns.
In 1971 the first commercial microprocessor had 2,300. That is the story Moore's law is about.
A few thousand switches, and it could add.
About twenty billion, and it can hold a conversation.
You do not own one computer. You live inside a few hundred of them.