

The MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuits (ICs), enabling Moore's law and very large-scale integration. The MOSFET (MOS transistor), invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959, was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturised and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on a mass-production basis, limiting the transistor counts and restricting their usage to a number of specialised applications.
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The curve shows counts doubling every two years, per Moore's lawĪmong the earliest products to use transistors were portable transistor radios, introduced in 1954, which typically used 4 to 8 transistors, often advertising the number on the radio's case. Plot of MOS transistor counts for microprocessors against dates of introduction. This makes the MOSFET the most widely manufactured device in history.

MOSFETs account for at least 99.9% of all transistors, the majority of which have been used for NAND flash memory manufactured during the early 21st century. In terms of the total number of transistors in existence, it has been estimated that a total of 13 sextillion ( 1.3 ×10 22) MOSFETs have been manufactured worldwide between 19. The first carbon nanotube computer has 178 transistors and is a 1-bit one-instruction set computer, while a later one is 16-bit (while the instruction set is 32-bit RISC-V). Early experimental solid state computers had as few as 130 transistors, but used large amounts of diode logic. In terms of computer systems that consist of numerous integrated circuits, the supercomputer with the highest transistor count as of 2016 is the Chinese-designed Sunway TaihuLight, which has for all CPUs/nodes combined "about 400 trillion transistors in the processing part of the hardware" and "the DRAM includes about 12 quadrillion transistors, and that's about 97 percent of all the transistors." To compare, the smallest computer, as of 2018 dwarfed by a grain of rice, has on the order of 100,000 transistors. As of 2020, the highest transistor count in any IC chip is a deep learning engine called the Wafer Scale Engine 2 by Cerebras, using a special design to route around any non-functional core on the device it has 2.6 trillion MOSFETs, manufactured using TSMC's 7 nm FinFET process. As of 2019, the highest transistor count in any IC chip was Samsung's 1 terabyte eUFS ( 3D-stacked) V-NAND flash memory chip, with 2 trillion floating-gate MOSFETs ( 4 bits per transistor). As of 2022, the highest transistor count GPU is Nvidia's H100, built on TSMC's N4 process and totalling 80 billion MOSFETs. Īs of 2022, the largest transistor count in a commercially available microprocessor is 114 billion MOSFETs, in Apple's ARM-based dual-die M1 Ultra system on a chip, which is fabricated using TSMC's 5 nm semiconductor manufacturing process. The rate at which MOS transistor counts have increased generally follows Moore's law, which observed that the transistor count doubles approximately every two years. It is the most common measure of IC complexity (although the majority of transistors in modern microprocessors are contained in the cache memories, which consist mostly of the same memory cell circuits replicated many times). It typically refers to the number of MOSFETs (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors, or MOS transistors) on an integrated circuit (IC) chip, as all modern ICs use MOSFETs. The transistor count is the number of transistors in an electronic device.
