From the course: The Challenge of Scale: Semiconductor Innovation and Manufacturing
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Semiconductor building blocks for microelectronics
From the course: The Challenge of Scale: Semiconductor Innovation and Manufacturing
Semiconductor building blocks for microelectronics
(upbeat music) - A key feature of semiconductor devices that has enabled such aggressive scaling in their performance and computational power while keeping power consumption down, is the fact that we can integrate billions of these devices into a very small area and fabricate them side-by-side on semiconductor wafers like this one. We discussed in the previous section how MOSFETs, metal oxide semiconductor field affect transistors, can be used as on/off switches for digital computation and memory. A single switch might look something like this. These resistors wired to the NMOS transistor in this case are used to control the voltage that's supplied to the three terminals, remember the gate, the drain, and the source, and are integrated on the same silicon substrate. Multiple switches, NMOS and and PMOS, are then connected together to form simple, logical functions: and, or, not and, not or, exclusive or, and so on. In this case, we see 14 transistors. Some are NMOS, some are PMOS…
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