the.com/semiconductor
a rock taught to think, hesitate, and run the entire modern world.
means A material—silicon being the famous one—whose ability to conduct electricity sits between a true conductor and an insulator, and can be precisely controlled, making it the foundation of transistors, chips, and nearly all modern electronics.
from A modern compound, built piece by piece: 'semi-' from Latin, meaning 'half' or 'partly,' bolted onto 'conductor,' from Latin 'conducere,' 'to lead together' (con- 'together' + ducere 'to lead'). So literally a 'half-leader' of electricity. The 'conductor' of electrical science predates the electronics age, but 'semiconductor' is a child of the late 19th and 20th centuries, when physicists noticed certain substances stubbornly refused to be either good wires or good barriers—and engineers eventually learned that this very stubbornness, properly coaxed, could be made to compute.
- middle ground
- Conducts electricity only when it feels like it
- sand origin
- Most chips start as purified beach silicon
- doping
- Adding impurities on purpose makes them work
- transistor count
- Modern chips pack tens of billions of switches
- tiny scale
- Features now smaller than many viruses
tsmc — taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company produces over 50% of the world's semiconductors as of 2024
intel — founded 1968, dominates x86 processors for computers with ~20% global market share
samsung electronics — south korean conglomerate, world's largest memory chip manufacturer since 2017
nvidia — gpu manufacturer worth $3 trillion as of 2024, dominant in ai chips