“No technology has leaned as heavily on the astonishing growth in transistor count as the GPU, enabling incredible levels of graphical performance within the power and area constraints placed on mobile devices,” said Beets, as he acknowledged Imagination’s debt to “the legacy of the amazing breakthrough by Bell Labs 70 years ago”.Fairchild Semiconductor was a pioneering semiconductor company that was founded in the late 1950s.
It made the hearing aid a practical reality, transformed popular culture with the creation of the transistor radio and reduced the size of the computer from a whole room to something you can wear on your wrist.”įor consumer devices like the low-voltage radio chips used in a hearing aids, for example, up to 42 million transistors can be placed on less than 7mm 2 of silicon.Īnd of course, GPUs delivering visual images of the quality and definition in displays that we have all come to take for granted have been a key beneficiary. The technology has transformed the world. “The typical smartphone boasts around 85 billion of them. “Today, 10 million transistors could be placed in a pin head,” said Beets. Intel had already passed the one-million transistors-per-chip milestone by 1989.Īnd despite the passage of another 27 years since that publication and many forecasts of its imminent demise, a stretched version Moore’s Law still seems to apply: engineers are still doubling the component count of a microchip at regular intervals, with costs continuing to fall too. This continual remorseless shrinking process keeps the electronics industry in a state of perpetual revolution.”
The number of transistors that can be crammed onto a microchip doubles every 18 months as the size of the transistor halves every three years. In a book marking Electronics Weekly‘s 30th year of publication Leon Clifford wrote about Gordon Moore’s 1965 observation, later dubbed in the industry as ‘Moore’s Law’: Imagination Technologies has created a neat and informative timeline of the development of the transistor market ( click on the image to enlarge it).
Timeline of the development of the transistor compiled by Imagination Technologies
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