TECHNOLOGISTS ARE CONSTANTLY seeking to make silicon chips smaller and smaller. But it’s not just so your iPhone will fit more snugly in your pocket; it’s all about speed.
Electrons travel at the speed of light, which is to say, as fast as it’s possible for anything in our universe to travel. The smaller the chip, the faster electrons can zip around it, and so the faster the chip will be.
It seems absurd to think of the time taken for an electron moving at 186,000 miles per second to travel a distance measured in nanometres; but that time is a major bottleneck. Making smaller chips means making faster computers.
