The Extreme Physics Pushing Moore’s Law to the Next Level

A look inside a new precision machine that wants to reinvent the chip making industry. »Subscribe to Seeker! »Watch more Focal Point | An integrated circuit, or chip, is one of the biggest innovations of the 20th century. The microchip launched a technological revolution, created Silicon Valley, and everyone’s got one in their pocket (read: smartphones). When you zoom in on one of these chips, you find a highly complex, nanoscale-sized city that’s expertly designed to send information back and forth. And chip manufacturers continue to shrink the size of microchips, hitting smaller and smaller milestones while also increasing the number of features a chip has. The result is an improved overall processing power. This is what’s been driving the semiconductor industry—a drumbeat called Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law is the golden rule in computing: The number of transistors on a microchip can be expected to doub