[HN Gopher] Transistors are civilization's invisible infrastructure
___________________________________________________________________
Transistors are civilization's invisible infrastructure
Author : danboarder
Score : 146 points
Date : 2022-12-07 09:33 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Whenever I read sci-fi stories and there is talk of self
| replicating robots/factories/machines or even generation ships,
| there is a huge jump in technology/magic that is _never_
| discussed - what technology is used to replace semiconductors -
| because a portable semiconductor fab seems so outside the realm
| of possibility now. It would be such a revolutionary change that
| it 's outside the realm of speculation besides handwaving at
| bioengineered replacements or easy atomic level manipulation ala
| The Culture series.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| My thinking is: there are many ways to make matter do compute.
| Semiconductor-based digital logic chips are only _one_ of many
| possibilities.
|
| You can make an analog computer from just about anything, it's
| a matter of identifying things you can interpret as flows and
| stores (or, as the professors who taught control systems at my
| uni, faucets, drains and bathtubs), and arranging them just
| right. You can make a digital computer from just about anything
| too - it's a matter of identifying things you can interpret as
| a NAND gate, and stacking them just right. You can encode a
| neural network model as grooves in plastic sheets, stack them
| into layers, and have it naturally process incoming light. Etc.
| The possibilities are limitless, because computing is more
| about your mental model, and less about the substrate itself.
|
| So I imagine, the breakthrough for nanotech will be when
| someone figures out _a_ way to make _some_ kind of programmable
| computer that works at nanoscale, can be easily produced, and
| is somewhat robust against the environment. It doesn 't need to
| be a _fast_ computer - we 're used to multi-GHz CPUs and multi-
| MHz microcontrollers, but at nanoscale, even an equivalent of
| an old 8008 will do, or even something much weaker: single
| nanobot doesn't _need_ much compute. You 'll be deploying them
| by thousands or millions at a time anyway, and you'll want to
| program them as a swarm anyway.
| throw_nbvc1234 wrote:
| Reminds me of the Cloudflare lava lamps
|
| https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/lava-lamp-
| encryption...
| speed_spread wrote:
| I assume in those stories that nanotech has displaced
| photolithography in the fabrication of microelectronics. If you
| can get nanoassemblers to reliably produce a simple CPU, you
| can pick up the slack through software and bootstrap from
| there.
| [deleted]
| carapace wrote:
| There are pretty much only three major inventions (he claimed
| boldly, hoping to spark a fun and informative discussion):
|
| The Haber-Bosch Process, without which none of us would be here
| reading this today.
|
| The transistor. 'natch.
|
| Rare earth magnets (which enable small strong motors, which
| enable tiny drones and factories, which revolutionizes
| economics.)
| Yahivin wrote:
| And all made possible by abundant energy from petroleum
| products.
| Aissen wrote:
| Isn't this 20th century history 101 ? Not much to dispute here,
| but might bear repeating.
| sockaddr wrote:
| Transistors are the dominant life-form on Earth.
| johnohara wrote:
| "The Computing Machines in the Future" (1985)
| http://cse.unl.edu/~seth/434/Web%20Links%20and%20Docs/Feynma...
|
| In section 3, Reducing the Size, he speculates having a billion
| transistors in a computer, then immediately qualifies his
| statement.
|
| That was almost thirty years ago.
| glasss wrote:
| I'd be willing to say electromagnetic waves and signals are the
| true invisible, magic infrastructure. But of course transistors
| and ICs do most of the magic.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| Wifi still blows my mind.
| joshbaptiste wrote:
| Indeed.. just completed "Chip War" by Chris Miller which delves
| into the history and the Geopolitics of this wonderful invention.
| After WWII Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea owe their
| prosperities to the transistor.
| Victerius wrote:
| Your comment reminds me of a line by Boromir (Sean Bean) in
| _The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring_.
|
| _" It is a strange fate we should suffer so much fear and
| doubt... over so small a thing. Such a little thing."_
|
| Where the little thing here is the transistor.
| the_chatman wrote:
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This article has a link to the IEEE electonic devices meeting,
| and flipping through the presentations, optical interconnects
| come up, leading to the still rather sci-fi notion of the
| photonic computer:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_transistor
|
| > "In principle, all-optical digital signal processing and
| routing is achievable using optical transistors arranged into
| photonic integrated circuits. The same devices could be used to
| create new types of optical amplifiers to compensate for signal
| attenuation along transmission lines."
| infiniteUnivers wrote:
| > In fact, each of us is surrounded by billions, if not trillions
| of transistors, none of which are visible to the naked eye.
|
| * glances over at bins of assorted TO-92 and TO-220's *
|
| checkmate, Mr. Goldstein.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Fair, though even still, those are hidden away in little
| plastic boxes. The _actual meat_ of a transistor isn 't really
| visible except by analogue, eg observing an equivalent
| behaviour going on inside a glass vacuum tube.
| akeck wrote:
| Would it be fair to call the past 5-7 decades the "Silicon Age"
| or the "Transistor Age"?
| kens wrote:
| The IBM 1401 was the most popular computer of the early 1960s,
| with over 10,000 produced. It was built from germanium (not
| silicon) transistors. So silicon shouldn't get all the credit.
| mjcohen wrote:
| I wrote a lot of 1401 code in the 60's at UCLA including a
| 1401 assembler (5 x faster than IBM's), a floating point
| package, and an assembler for the historic SWAC there. It was
| a lot of fun.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Transistors made of non-silicon materials have existed for a
| long time.
| layer8 wrote:
| "Silicon Age" is being used, though "Information Age" and
| "Digital Age" are more common:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Age
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I mean transistors are neat and all, but what really sets
| things apart for me is integrated circuits. When you look at
| the size of the discrete MOnSter 6502 CPU[1], featured here[2]
| recently, and realize it has around 3k transistors and the
| latest CPUs and GPUs have several billion...
|
| And not just transistors, but analog circuits as well, allowing
| for extremely compact designs.
|
| [1]: https://monster6502.com/
|
| [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33841901
| ghaff wrote:
| The real driving force for about the last 40 years--starting
| with PCs, then larger systems, and eventually almost
| everything--was integrated circuits using CMOS technology.
| CMOS process shrinks have been an incredible lever. Not the
| only one of course but a major one. The transistor itself was
| an incredibly important inventions of course but it's the
| ability to pack so many of them economically into a very
| small amount of space that really delivered on its promise.
| doctorwho42 wrote:
| I think the transistor age would make more sense, it allows the
| age to cover a broader stretch of history. Think about things
| like the stone/bronze/iron ages, it's not any one new tool but
| the base technology itself. So if silicon gets supplanted I
| don't think we will stop using transistors.
|
| But who knows with quantum photonics, maybe laser/optic
| circuits will supplant a large chunk of silicon transistors in
| the next 100 years
| bluGill wrote:
| Only time will tell, but at least for now it seems like either
| will work for the next few thousand years. Iron is still
| important, and Bronze is still used, but Silicon seems the like
| backbone of our civilization now.
| bee_rider wrote:
| SI (in our ceramics) has been a popular construction and
| pottery material forever, pottery shards are, after all, one
| of the main ways that we distinguish which ancient cultures
| were spreading where. The problem with "Silicon age" is that
| use of lots of silicon is not a distinguishing factor for an
| age, haha.
| thfuran wrote:
| For the next few thousand years? I sure wouldn't make a
| prediction about what technology is going to be important
| with a time horizon that long. Vacuum tubes are barely a
| century old.
| maxwell wrote:
| If you're going for a modern version of "Ages of Humanity" akin
| to Hesiod/Ovid, sure, if not Digital or Information.
|
| But Stone/Copper/Bronze/Iron refer specifically to the dominant
| material for crafting weaponry. In that sense, maybe we're in
| the transition between Steel and Plastic, though maybe a case
| could be made for Lead.
|
| Or we really are in the Nuclear Age, and it becomes the Final
| Age of Humanity.
|
| Or war has gone digital, and we are in the Information Age,
| beyond terrestrial materials. In that case, true Space and then
| Atomic (universal assembler) Ages may follow.
| mkl95 wrote:
| Historians of the future will probably refer to the dot-com
| bubble as the start of the Silicon Age. But another take could
| be that the silicon and transistor age started at the same time
| with commercial silicon transistors (mid 50s).
| Retric wrote:
| Historians lump ever longer stretches of time together the
| further into the past stuff becomes. I suspect they will
| start pre WWII with mechanical calculators or focus on
| computer networks as the defining moment.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Computational, analytical, scientific, or something like
| that, maybe?
| jl6 wrote:
| No, I think the concept of ages is itself a historiographic
| fiction that peaked in the 20th century, as an attempt to
| impose order and narrative on the unstructured chaos of
| history. But they are one-dimensional, westcentric, and IMHO
| obsolete.
| mycall wrote:
| Historians have been calling it the Information Age.
| Transistors is just gating or amplifying information over
| electricity.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Transistor, information, or automation could be good I think.
| Another option maybe -- what really distinguishes our
| civilization right now is that we've integrated out economies
| around the entire planet, so "global age" might be a good
| candidate.
|
| Silicon is present in sand, so we've been using it forever in
| ceramics, on some level. Like copper, it has been a good friend
| to humanity for a very long time. The only problem is that
| "using lots of SI" is not a distinguishing characteristic for
| an age!
|
| We call it the Iron Age because iron is a grumpy, unfriendly
| element that didn't want to help out until we got some pretty
| fancy forges.
|
| Maybe we could use it to mark some larger scales. Silicon age
| could start around 25k years ago with the invention of pottery.
| Before that, I dunno, fire age or rock age.
| squarefoot wrote:
| I can't but think of this analogy: Transistors are like Judo. You
| can use them by keeping your feet firmly on the _ground_ , then
| applying a small amount of energy to a point (base current) you
| can control and use to your advantage a much bigger energy that
| comes from the opponent (collector current through the load).
| pkoird wrote:
| As a child, presumably like many others, I was pretty enthralled
| by the concept of magic, magical formations, spells, and etc. And
| it was equally disheartening to not find oneself in such a world.
| But growing up, I realized that we already have magic in our
| world, which we call electricity. We have formations to harness
| its powers, which would be the chips, and we have spells aka
| coding to bring them all together to literally perform magic.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I had a dream once where I somehow was in the far, far future.
| At first everything seemed like it had regressed or gone back
| to a more middle ages / middle earth type aesthetic. But then
| it became obvious that this was intentional - people had
| rejected a lot of technology and hidden others. So there were
| many things that did indeed seem like oldschool magic but were
| actually just powered behind the scenes by some very advanced
| tech.
| Aromasin wrote:
| This makes for a great writing prompt. In some ways, you're
| describing the Warhammer 40k universe. The people of that
| world don't necessarily "reject" technology, but any
| understanding of it is lost, and things are maintained
| through ancient relics; the meaning behind which is
| completely unknown. It's a great fiction premise.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > But growing up, I realized that we already have magic in our
| world, which we call electricity.
|
| Today its kind of boring to most people (not me obviously) but
| imagine how magical it was upon discovery and propagation. A
| common need in industry is to turn a shaft which we now do with
| electric motors. Prior to the motor the only installable, on-
| demand source of rotational power was a steam engine. It had
| lots of moving parts, required a boiler, and fuel source that
| was either coal or wood and had to be carted in by horse. Then
| you had to hire skilled and trained operators to maintain the
| engines and the boilers.
|
| With electric all you do is connect two or three wires to a
| hunk of iron and copper and a shaft supported by two bearings
| spins. Just make sure the bearings are oiled, brushes (DC
| motors were once common) are in proper order, and you're good
| to go. There is no dangerous combustion or flue gas, pipes, or
| burn hazards, no fuel storage or hazards, no bulky boiler and
| no need for boilermen. In an instant an invisible force is
| pushing the shaft around who's only wear items are serviceable
| bearings. If you needed light to see the machines these motors
| operated just connect two wires to a glass sphere which emitted
| a bright illuminating glow. That's magic.
|
| Now thanks to modern high power transistors and smaller faster
| transistors in microchips we can tame this magical force much
| more accurately and cheaply enabling electric cars, led
| lighting, solar and renewables, high efficiency switching power
| supplies, and so much more.
|
| All this thanks to the magical invisible force of electricity
| and electromagnetism tamed by our equally magical
| semiconducting devices. The modern world is literally moved by
| these devices.
|
| I consider wireless to be black magic which is also enabled by
| really fast transistors.
| km3r wrote:
| Fun story about a world with programmable magic:
| https://www.themagineer.com/
| stevekemp wrote:
| See also:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/631233.Wizard_s_Bane
| Oxidation wrote:
| And also the _Laundry Files_ where computation _is_ magic
| (and also thins the walls of reality and allows the horrors
| that chitter behind to, well, not be behind it).
|
| Also hydrofluoric dragons.
| calebm wrote:
| This talk on how silicon chips are manufactured, called
| "Indistinguishable from Magic" shows just how magical they are:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGFhc8R_uO4
| colordrops wrote:
| This dawned on me as well when I watched a Feynman video on
| electromagnetism. He talked about that you can explain the
| "how" of its working, but not the "why". The fundamental forces
| of the universe are basically magic fields. And this is true
| for anything that is fundamental and can't be deconstructed
| further into more primary components.
| chinabot wrote:
| This! Its not an 8 layer ISO stack
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model), there many layers
| below the first layer some of which nobody understands.
| A-Train wrote:
| Not sure it you know Terry Pratchett and his discworld series
| but this was his exact train of thought.
|
| http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/10...
| dhdc wrote:
| Un-paywalled: http://archive.today/geASm
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I grew up with Harry Potter and now I express that I eventually
| became a wizard. I just scribble runes onto paper, then do
| clicky-clacks on my keyboard translating the runes into spells
| and make machines do magic.
| bitwize wrote:
| As I say -- we imbue stones engraved with runes with lightning,
| making them come alive and do our bidding. Tell me again
| computers are not magic?
| pjmorris wrote:
| Danny Hillis makes a similar analogy in 'The Pattern on the
| Stone', where he reasons that if someone 200-300 years ago
| where told what he did for work he'd be burned as a witch.
| Kye wrote:
| 400-500 might be closer to accurate. 200-300 years ago was
| deep into the Enlightenment and well past the Scientific
| Revolution. Witch trials were already a fringe and rare thing
| by the 1600s.
| connicpu wrote:
| It would very much depend on _who_ you spoke to from the
| 1600s. If you spoke to an enlightened philosopher or
| scientist sure, but trying to explain it to people in a
| rural village may have a worse outcome for you.
| Koshkin wrote:
| 1833 | In the United States, a Tennessee man was prosecuted
| for witchcraft.
| [deleted]
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I think you're making a mistake by assuming that the
| Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution were universal
| phenomena, and not localized due to the world being a much
| larger and slower place.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| An everyday lunacy to me is people walking around using
| their smartphones and blathering things that if they only
| knew the technology imbued into that smartphone they might
| be crushed by the physical force of the irony.
|
| Listening to some teenager complain about how they "hate
| nerds" or <insert pseudoscience> or <insert antiscience
| idiocy> with a device that is using quantum-level physics,
| materials engineering, electrical engineering, math,
| computer science, chemistry, unimaginable nerd-centuries of
| effort.
|
| Modern humanity exists in a miracle of technology.
| Witchcraft to people only 300 years ago. And to say nothing
| of heating, cooling, transportation, agriculture, medicine,
| etc.
|
| Transistor/Information Technology however may be building
| such a stack of technology dependence that is easily
| teetered and makes our whole civilization much more fragile
| to disruption. We saw it with Covid, about as insignificant
| a disruption as could be imagined, basically a test run for
| globalized trade and interdependence. Generally we failed.
|
| But then again I'm reaching the age where "prepping" starts
| to infect the mind.
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Witch trials were already a fringe and rare thing by the
| 1600s.
|
| "The period of the European witch trials, with the most
| active phase and which saw the largest number of fatalities
| seems to have occurred between 1560 and 1630.[31][5] The
| period between 1560 and 1670 saw more than 40,000
| deaths.[32]"
|
| from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_ea
| rly_mo...
|
| Did you find any actual statistics? I did not, but as far
| as I know witch trials happened _after_ the reformation and
| somewhat coincided with the enlightenment.
| barkingcat wrote:
| this also makes sense, because witch hunting socially
| would be a response to the successes of the scientific
| revoltion.
|
| Without the results/successes of tech developments, we
| probably wouldn't have as much witch burnings and hunts.
|
| Think about doctors walking around healing people, doing
| surgeries. That's basically what a witch does. Where else
| do they get their power?
|
| the Massachusetts witch trials were 1692-93, and pardons
| only started being given out well into the 1700's
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-
| of-th...
|
| There's also the critical theory about how the
| Enlightenment is only the Enlightenment in retrospect.
| During that time, it would have been a miserable
| existence full of broken and exploited people, and people
| believing in totally different realities and agendas.
|
| It's like someone looking back 500 years in the future
| would would say "during the covid era science developed
| significant breakthroughs in universal vaccine
| technology"
|
| Where as looking from today, it's all about vaccine/mask
| denialism, protests about 5G microchips, mass
| information, mass deaths (a lot of people died in the
| last 2 years from disease), etc.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _There 's also the critical theory about how the
| Enlightenment is only the Enlightenment in retrospect.
| During that time, it would have been a miserable
| existence full of broken and exploited people, and people
| believing in totally different realities and agendas._
|
| That's not a theory, that's the obvious interpretation of
| what everyone knows about the time period, including the
| people who were living in it. Even the texts of the
| enlightenment are often about how bad they think their
| society is.
| pjmorris wrote:
| > 400-500 might be closer to accurate. 200-300 years ago
|
| Probably more an issue with my memory than with Hillis'
| analogy.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Witch trials were supposed to be a modern scientific and
| legal process. They didn't happen in a systematic matter in
| the medieval period. So they are really an artifact of a
| narrow time period, bounded on one side by less
| proscriptive and thorough government and by Enlightenment
| philosophy about metaphysics and prosecution on the other.
| amelius wrote:
| > to literally perform magic.
|
| Yeah but the magic happens mostly behind a flat surface that we
| call a screen.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Well we also have these magic machines that drive themselves
| around. And pretty soon we'll be able to use our magic
| surfaces to order them to take us places.
| hugs wrote:
| Mostly... unless you get a few servos and an Arduino. That's
| all I needed to start down my path from my "below the glass"
| 100% software job to working in robotics and making the magic
| work "above the glass".
| malux85 wrote:
| Most of the magic happens inside the silicon chip with
| electricity inside it, you have to flatten the rock and put
| lightning inside.
| krallja wrote:
| You put the lightning inside by using a mystical
| combination of poisons (dopants) and engravings (rubylith).
| darepublic wrote:
| Yes and in dark souls magic spells are enabled by the
| intelligence stat
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Sadly this analogy begs the comparison to the Faith stat
| giving you magic defense. :(
| [deleted]
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| And watch cat videos. :)
| Koshkin wrote:
| The high-quality moving images on a flat screen still feel
| like magic.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-12-09 23:01 UTC)