The speed of information processing in a computer is determined by the number of transistors, which has allowed computers to develop faster and faster. However, there may be limits to reducing the size of transistors, and technological advances are being made to overcome these limits.
Humans have developed many technologies to make our lives easier and better. These technologies have greatly changed human society through the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age, and as a result, the quality of people’s lives has been greatly improved. Among these technologies, the development of computers has probably changed people’s lives the most. Today, it is very difficult to find a place in our society where computer technology is not used. From simple office work to finance, transportation, broadcasting, meteorology, research, and more, computers are used in a wide variety of fields, and they have dramatically increased the speed at which tasks can be completed.
The biggest advantage of computers is the speed at which they can process tasks. For example, the difference in speed between writing a document by hand and writing a document on a computer is huge. Another advantage is that computers can be made even faster. As the size of the different components used in computers has gotten smaller and smaller, more hardware can be packed into a single computer, which in turn leads to faster computers themselves. But how does the hardware of a computer allow for such fast processing speeds? Let’s take a look at the history of computer development.
The device we now call a computer was developed in 1950, about 70 years ago. However, the computers of that time used vacuum tubes to perform computational processing, and are known as first-generation computers. However, due to the nature of vacuum tubes, first-generation computers were very large, heated up a lot, and often broke down. These early computers were also very expensive to maintain. Two breakthroughs later led to the evolution of the second generation of computers, which were much more streamlined and had faster processing speeds. The two key technologies in the second generation of computers that had the biggest impact on speed were the transistor and the integrated circuit. The integrated circuit was invented by American electronics engineer Jack Kilby in 1958 while working at Texas Instruments, and its use in all computers since then has allowed for simpler structures and faster processing speeds. Kilby would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000 for his invention of the integrated circuit.
Since the advent of the second generation of computers, computer development has paralleled the development of integrated circuits. As the density of integrated circuits increased, the performance of computers increased, and so did the number of things they could do. The development of integrated circuits allowed CPUs to be miniaturized, and minicomputers became available for home use. Intel, Apple, IBM, and other companies worked to increase CPU performance, and they pushed the density of integrated circuits even further, creating high-density and ultra-high-density integrated circuits. In the process, CPUs grew exponentially in performance, which is explained by Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a CPU doubles every two years, and progress continues to be driven by this law to this day.
Looking at the history of computer development, we can conclude that the speed at which computers process information depends on the development of efficient technologies and the continuous improvement of those technologies. Since the second generation of computers to the present, the most efficient component of a computer has been the transistor, and increasing the number of transistors has increased the processing speed of computers. So why does CPU performance depend on the number of transistors? It’s because transistors are the core component of computer computation. Transistors used in integrated circuits such as CPUs are called MOSFETs (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistors), which are made by putting a layer of SiO2 and a layer of metal on a substrate, and then putting a p-type or n-type semiconductor on both sides. Depending on the type of semiconductor used, it is categorized as a p-MOSFET or n-MOSFET. When a voltage is applied to the transistor, current flows or is blocked, which can be used to regulate the signal. In real-world integrated circuits, c-MOSFETs are used, which combine two MOSFETs to form a gate by regulating electrical signals. These gates are used for computation in computers, so a higher number of transistors naturally leads to faster computation.
However, there is a limit to how many transistors we can increase by reducing their size. This is because the particles that make up matter are atoms, and atoms themselves have a size. In fact, since the mid-2000s, there was a period when transistors could no longer be shrunk in size because they would fail to perform their functions. The solution was to make the transistors thinner and taller to increase the area through which current can flow. This allowed transistors to start shrinking again, and they are now around 22 nanometers (nm) in size. These tiny nanometer-scale transistors are densely packed together to make up a CPU, which means that many transistors can fit inside a CPU, and the computational speed of computers naturally increases.
Computer technology has advanced at an incredible rate over the past 70 years. Since the invention of the transistor, research and development has exponentially increased the speed of computers, and research is still ongoing to reduce their size. Until better technology is developed and commercialized, computers using transistors will continue to improve and our lives will continue to get faster.
