To one who grew up in the age of vacuum tubes, microelectronics still seems like science fiction. But then, I’m the guy whose education finally ground to a halt in the super-abstract world of quantum physics. I guess everyone has a mental boundary beyond which one can’t travel. So articles like this fill me with a lot of wonder but little comprehension.

Microelectronics | Growing up | Economist.com

That is the thinking behind making transistors out of nanowires. The wires in question—strands of silicon—are but a few tens of nanometres thick. Though they make up for that in height (they are 2,000 nanometres tall). Their slight diameters mean that zillions of them could be crowded on to a single chip.

Nanowires forsooth! I challenge you to try to visualize nano-anything. A nano-inch is .000000001″ (or somethng like that – my math hasn’t survived the decades very well, either.) Maybe this is a religious thing. Lacking (and not missing) an electron microscope, I must take the existence of a nanowire on faith.

And there is another thing that makes these transistors radically different from others. Microelectronic components are produced by etching. A silicon chip is coated with layers of the chemicals needed to make the components in question. Those components are then carved out of these layers by chemical solvents that remove unwanted areas and leave the components as islands on the surface of the chip. Dr Riess’s nanowires, by contrast, are grown from scratch by exposing the chip to a silicon-rich gas. The desired pattern of nanowires has previously been picked out on the chip’s surface with spots of a catalyst that cause silicon from the gas to be deposited. The wires thus sprout only where the catalyst fertilises them.

I confess no comprehension at all of the foregoing. It’s a strange and marvelous world we live in.

Dave, still adding to his list of things he doesn’t understand.