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Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Microelectronic Devices

Crucial and essential to our lives, microelectronic devices — e.g., the microchips in computers and cell phones — process and store information. The building block of any microelectronic device is the transistor, invented in the 1940s. Because of increasingly smaller transistors and other improvements, computers that once occupied an entire room in a building now fit on a laptop or even in a smart watch. Learn more about microelectronics with this video.

Topics:
Electronics & Computers

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    Transcript

    00:00:01 When we look at the field of microelectronics, we're talking about a subfield of electronics having to do with small devices. And those devices, whether you're looking at different chips, you're looking at memory, they actually are used to compose something that's more complex. Microelectronics are critical to nearly every aspect of our lives. From computers to smartphones. Whether it is your car, whether it's sensors, it's a washing machine. From entertainment equipment to medical facility from a digital home to automotive electronics, Microelectronics are essential to the economic

    00:00:47 promise and national security of the United States. Microelectronics develops the building block of electronic devices such as transistors. A transistor is very tiny nowadays. In terms of what makes them so powerful. It's the capability, but also the size. Think about human hair. One human hair is about 100 micrometer. One micrometer is 1000 times of one nanometer. There are 100 millions of transistors

    00:01:42 within an area of 54 by 44 nanometer squares. So now you can imagine how small the transistor is. There's different opportunities that exist because of the scale, but also because of the power. It is critical that we develop low power electronics. This is because the energy need to support increasing computing capacity in a number of electronic devices in the future will be huge. It's not just going to be about performance. It's going to be also with power or energy efficiency.

    00:02:26 It is also going to be looking at the environment and what's the impact of the power requirements on the environment and carbon emission. If you only have to charge your cell phone once a month, how would that change how things are done? You want to get to things being more energy efficient. I want to see the future of microelectronics to be more beneficial to the society, and I wanted to be part of that, contributing to this, this development. My excitement really stemmed from being around electronics growing up,

    00:03:08 but also I would say a little bit of my father saying don't touch. That means touch when they're not looking. So I learned how to use the solder pots. I learned how to solder so I could touch, build boards, and it became fun.