The Best Things Come in Small Packages
Pluck a hair from your head. (Really.) Now look at it. It isn't very thick, is it? Well, to a microprocessor manufacturer, that hair looks like a telephone pole. That's because a hair is more than 50 times wider than a transistor on a microprocessor. Wires between transistors are even thinner. They're more than 100 times thinner than a hair.
How big is a human hair? About 100 microns in diameter. That means a transistor is just 2 microns wide.
What's a micron? It's a very small metric measurement. You're probably familiar with centimeter marks on a ruler. (If not, go look at one.) A micron is .0001 of a centimeter.
A microprocessor transistor then is .0005 centimeters wide. (Want that in inches? It's .0001965 of an inch.)
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