Digital goldSilicon is the material of choice in the chip industry. Unlike the metals usually used to conduct electrical currents, silicon is a ‘semiconductor,’ meaning that its conductive properties can be increased by mixing it with other materials such as phosphorus or boron. This makes it possible to turn an electrical current on or off.
The good news is that it’s everywhere! Silicon is made from sand, and it is the second most abundant element on earth after oxygen. Silicon wafers are made using a type of sand called silica sand, which is made of silicon dioxide. The sand is melted, and cast in a large cylinder called an ‘ingot.’ This ingot is then sliced into thin wafers.
A microchip the size of your fingernail contains billions of transistors, so it’s easy to understand just how small the features on a chip need to be. Chip features are measured in nanometers. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter or a millionth of a millimeter.
For comparison, a human red blood cell is 7,000 nanometers in diameter, and the average virus is 14. The minor structures on the most advanced chips are currently 10 nanometers. ASML’s EUV (extreme ultraviolet) technology enables the scale of a bit of feature to be reduced even further. The smaller the elements in the patterns our systems can create, the more transistors manufacturers can fit on a chip, and the more the chip can do.
Computing power
Chip improvements are behind the incredible increase in computing power and memory function that has allowed technology to advance to where it is today. 1956 to 2015, computing power increased one trillion-fold, thanks to chips. Think about this: the computer that navigated the Apollo missions to the moon was about twice as powerful as a Nintendo console. It had 32.768 Random Access Memory (RAM) and 589.824 reading Only Memory (ROM) bits. A modern smartphone has around 100,000 times as much processing power, with about a million times more RAM and seven million times more ROM.
Chips enable virtual reality and on-device artificial intelligence (AI) applications and gains in data transfer such as 5G connectivity. They’re also behind algorithms such as those used in deep learning.
All this computing produces a lot of data. By 2025, the world will be creating 175 zettabytes (ZB) of data per year or roughly the equivalent of one billion terabytes (TB). For comparison, according to market intelligence company IDC’s ‘Data Age 2025’ whitepaper, if you were to store 175 zettabytes on DVDs, your stack of DVDs would be high enough to circle the earth 222 times.
This wholesale implant event, organized by company management, dovetailed with Three Square Market’s longer-term vision of a cashless payment system for their vending machines – workplace snacks purchased with a flick of the wrist. And the televised “chipping party” proved to be a savvy marketing tactic, the story picked up by media outlets from Moscow to Sydney.
But not all of the attention was positive. After the event, comments on Three Square Market’s Facebook page urged employees to quit. The company’s Google reviews page was inundated with one-star ratings. And Christian groups – convinced that the implants fulfilled an end-of-days prophecy where people are branded with “the mark of the beast” – accused the company of being the antichrist.
Jowan Österlund, a Swedish tattooist and body piercing specialist whose company Biohax provided Three Square Market with the microchips, watched with interest.
You must be logged in to post a comment.