this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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AFAIK the smallest usable atom is about 150 picometer carbon, and the smallest amount of atoms theoretically possible to make a transistor is 3, so there is (probably) no way to go below 450 picometer. There is probably also no way to actually achieve 450 picometer which is the same as 0.45 nanometer.
So the idea that they are currently going below 2nm is of course untrue, but IDK what the real measure is?
What they are doing at the leading chip manufacturing factories is amazing, so amazing it's kind of insane. But it's not actually 2nm.
Just for info, one silicon/silicium atom is 0.2 nm.
For a while now the "nm" has been a bit of a marketing description aiming for what the size would be if you extrapolated the way things used to be to today. The industry spent so long measuring that when the measurement broke down they just kind of had to fudge it to keep the basis of comparison going, for lack of a better idea . If we had some fully volumetric approach building these things equally up in three dimensions, we'd probably have less than "100 pm" process easily, despite it being absurd.
There is no way less than 100 pm can make sense.
As I said. It's an extrapolation of the rules from once upon a time to a totally different approach. It's marketing and increasingly subjective. Any number can "make sense" in that context. The number isn't based on anything you could actually measure for a long time now, it's already a fiction, so it can go wherever.
People have accepted heat pumps as 400% efficient. This is the same.
And realistically, how do you describe in an approachable way “you experience what would look like an impossible number if we had continued as before”, where the “if” is key, as is “you experience”
For what it's worth, I think the heat pump measurement makes way more sense. What I want is to heat my house. I give you one watt hour and you give me 4 watt hours of heat. Sounds like 400% to me.
The real issue here is that for the most part the measurements never meant anything for silicon chips. At least too end users.