Die shrink has been more or less continuous since around 1970. A few years later, the
6 μm process allowed the making of
desktop computers, known as microcomputers.
Moore's Law in the next 40 years brought features 1/100 the size, or ten thousand times as many transistors per square millimeter, putting
smartphones in every pocket. Eventually computers will be developed with fundamental parts that are no bigger than a few
nanometers. Nanocomputers might be built in several ways, using mechanical, electronic, biochemical, or
quantum nanotechnology. There used to be consensus among hardware developers that it is unlikely that nanocomputers will be made of
semiconductor transistors, as they seem to perform significantly less well when shrunk to sizes under 100 nanometers. Nevertheless developers reduced
microprocessor features to 22 nm in April 2012. Moreover, Intel's
5 nanometer technology outlook predicts 5 nm feature size by 2022. The
International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors in the 2010s gave an industrial consensus on feature scaling following
Moore's Law. A silicon-silicon
bond length is 235.2 pm, which means that a 5 nm-width transistor would be 21 silicon atoms wide. ==See also==