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Comment by throw0101a

1 day ago

So how small are individual components (e.g., transistors) nowadays? Presumably there's a lower limit: once you're a few atoms across, it seems that you can't go any smaller (?).

Gates are about 30-50 nm wide, even though they're called '3nm' for marketing reasons.

  • Metal pitch is 26nm. That means parallel wires can be placed 2 wavelengths apart with 13.5nm light.

  • As The Register used to call it, these clean-sounding process nodes (15nm, 5nm, 3nm etc) are "marchitecture." Marketing architecture. Reality is much messier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process