A wafer with a lot of the new 14 nm Broadwell chips
Moore’s Law named for Gordon Moore the founder of Intel describes the idea that the size of transistors will continue to decrease so that we can put more of them into a single chip. Back in the 1970s, there were about 2,000 transistors in your average ‘chip’. Today there are well over 2,000,000,000. The newest transistors, called the Broadwell are only 14 nanometers in size. Remember that a nanometer is 1/1,000,000,000 of a meter so if you took 71,000,000 of these transistors and laid them end to end it would be about a meter. Scientists believe that Moore’s law (that demands at least two-fold improvements less than every two years) will be valid up to the 7 nanometer scale. Then what? Scientists are working hard on different kinds of transistors that will be made of single molecules from which we can make even smaller transistors.