There are semiconductors everywhere: in your smartphone there are many different varieties, some serving as the sensors in the camera, others storing photos of your family. Most exciting, however, are those that act as the brains of our devices, where the more transistors you have, the more calculations you can carry out and the more powerful the computer. The latest such chips can fit roughly 15 million transistors into a dot the size of a single full stop on this page. The transistors in today’s smartphones are not just smaller than a red blood cell (about a thousand times smaller, as it
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