Across the course of human history what have we manufactured the most? Perhaps coins? The US Mint can process up to about 20 billion coins a year, so maybe mankind has made about a thousand billion coins since the first ones appeared around 600BC.
No, it’s not coins: in fact transistors are our most prolific creation.
In 1947 the first transistor was made by John Bardeen, William Brattain and William Shockley. According to Wikipedia, since then and in just under 75 years, we have now made about 13,000 billion billion of these tiny electronic circuits.
Transistors form the core of the integrated chips that every day power our smart devices and laptops, gaming consoles and TV sets, dishwashers and laundry machines, cars and aircraft, and in fact almost every appliance and item of equipment in our lives.
Current transistor technology generally uses silicon as a substrate. Silicon (actually silicon-dioxide) in the form of silica quartz granules makes up most of mineral sand. A single grain of sand is about half a millimetre in diameter. A 5ml teaspoon would hold about 40,000 grains.
A chip transistor is even smaller. The first computer chip was the Intel 4040, introduced in 1974, and had about 3,000 transistors in a chip smaller than the nail of your little finger. The latest Apple iPhone model, the 12 series announced last October, uses the A14 Bionic chip, designed by Apple and manufactured under contract by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSM).
The A14 has almost 12 billion transistors, all squeezed into the iPhone which comfortably fits in your hand. By contrast, 12 billion grains of sand, each a half a millimetre, would need about 300,000 teaspoons or about 1,500 litres to hold them all – equivalent to a very generous bathtub completely filled with sand.
One of the largest supercomputers in the world, the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight, uses about 12 million billion transistors for its computing and memory systems. This would be equivalent to 600 50m Olympic swimming pools each completely filled with sand, but all squashed into a modest building hosting the supercomputer system.
Smart devices
The global pandemic has resulted in a shortage of computer chips as demand for remote working and home entertainment during quarantining has soared. Apple has admitted that its production of the iPhone 12 series has been slowed by the chip shortages as the worldwide market for gaming consoles, tablets, laptops and other smart devices has accelerated. Samsung, Sony, Microsoft and others have reported similar production delays.
Car manufacturing worldwide has been gravely impacted by the chip shortages. Chips in today’s cars control every aspect of the performance, safety and comfort of the vehicles. While the unavailability of a single €1 chip can hold up the manufacture of a €400 gaming console, it can equally stall the manufacture of a €30,000 car.
Fiat Chrysler, Ford, Honda, Mazda, Nissan and Volkswagen are among the major brands that have had to slow manufacturing or even stop production lines altogether since last month due to chip shortages.
Smart device and computer manufacturers have decades of experience in managing through the cyclic nature of the chip industry, but car manufacturers are relative newcomers to the sector. The car industry’s “just in time” manufacturing practices strongly discourage stockpiling of components. Some manufacturers actually reduced their orders for chips during 2020 because of falling demand for new vehicles during the pandemic, not expecting a potential shortfall in worldwide chip production.
Toyota is one of the few brands to announce that it anticipated the global chip shortfall and has built a sufficient stockpile to manage through the downturn, potentially giving it a competitive advantage.
Full capacity
Chip-design companies contract with chip foundries, and these are running at full capacity. Spinning up a new one is immensely complex, requiring billions of euro and taking a couple of years of construction and tuning. It requires a seismically-stable foundation, and consumes volumes of deionised water, cost-effective electrical power and a number of hazardous chemicals.
TSM is the largest foundry firm in the industry, and expects its earnings to grow by at least 18 per cent this year, driven by the global move towards electric cars and new gadgets. It is investing $28 billion this year to increase capacity.
We may have manufactured 13,000 billion billion transistors so far but our demand continues to dramatically increase. There are maybe 250 billion stars in the Milky Way, and maybe 250 billion galaxies like the Milky Way in the universe. If these estimates are valid, then the universe is thus about 62,500 billion billion stars. All the transistors made here on Earth so far are, therefore, the equivalent of about 20 per cent of the number of all the stars in the entire universe.
But if these numbers seem almost unimaginable, then consider that while a single 5ml teaspoon may be able to hold 40,000 grains of sand, it can also hold 160,000 billion billion molecules of water.
Many more molecules than all the stars in the universe sit in just a teaspoon of water: think about that as you stir your next cup of tea.
