If everything we own had improved over the last 25 years as much as electronics have, the average family car would travel four times faster than the space shuttle. Houses would cost two hundred bucks. Whats the secret behind electronics stunning advances . How many times have i reviewed these and wondered exactly whats inside there . Do you mind if i have a look . No, not at all, go ahead. Id like to have a look inside. Please do. Where i come from, you want to know how something works, you cut it open. Sony versus saw. Here we go. Think you guys are standing far enough back . cause i would not want anyone to get hurt. evil laughter what do you think well find . Elves . Butterflies . And now lets see what really is on the inside of a digital camera. Not much, really. And no moving parts at all. This digital camera. This is the brains. Pogue . Runs on a halfinchwide microchip. So it seems like if this is really the heart of the camera, a lot of it just exists so that i can handle it with my big human hands. Correct, cause thats not exactly the most comfortable form factor you want to be using right there. I know. Honey, smile. Cmon, let me see you smile. Cmon. Pogue this tiny wafer contains a highly sophisticated machine. Whats it made of . A computer chip is like a densely packed city a solid slab of silicon sprinkled with other elements like boron and arsenic, topped by layers of metals and ceramics. Theyre laid out like tiny, functional neighborhoods. Over here is memory. 50 years ago youd have needed a whole Building Full of vacuum tubes to store just a fraction of what fits in here. Over here is where data comes in and out of the chip. 50 years ago the fastest computer on earth could process maybe a few hundred punch cards a minute. Today, data goes in and out billions of times faster. And here is the processor. 50 years ago a computer could add a few thousand numbers in a second. In that same amount of time, this tiny chip can perform billions of calculations. Scientists have discovered that the secret to cheap Computing Power is size. When we find the right materials and make them small, they change the world. The race to miniaturize began 500 years ago with an invention that, in its day, was the first personal computer. Im talking about the watch. How did they go from big wallmounted grandfather clocks to something you could wear on your wrist . The miniaturization. More functions in a smaller space. Pogue pierre gygax is a watchmaker in switzerland. Some of his watches have more than 400 components. And how small are some of the parts . There are parts which are. 006 millimeter. So that means a half the thickness of a hair. Wow. Hundreds of precision metal pieces, all driven by a simple mechanism that all clocks have in one form or another the oscillator, the beating heart of the machine. Its the piece that puts the tick and the tock in time. Gygax you know the time is flowing. And its always difficult to measure something flowing. So, what we do is we cut the time in slices. And the oscillator is counting the slices. Pogue the original oscillator was the pendulum, slicing like a knife through time, with each swing counted by the movement of circular gears. But pendulum clocks work only if theyre upright in a fixed position. So in the middle ages, clocks were confined to immovable structures like towers or furniture. But in the 15th century, the invention of the mainspring changed everything. It was essentially the first battery a metal coil that could store mechanical energy. As it unwound, the mainspring powered a compact wheel. It was a major breakthrough. Suddenly, gravity and the pendulum were no longer necessary. The new springdriven mechanism made it possible to shrink the clock to fit into a hand or a pocket. And the pocket watch was born. Gygax this watch is absolutely amazing. It shows the exact position of the sun and the moon all around the earth from the top of the north pole. Pogue oh man, thats really cool. And how much does this watch go for . Between 80,000 and 90,000. laughs pogue but no need to spend 90 grand to find out what time it is. Nowadays, super accurate watches are disposable. Thanks to another great clock revolution, which began in the 1960s. Out went the spring and mechanical oscillator, replaced by a tiny sliver of solid mineral quartz. Slice a piece of quartz small enough, send an electric current through it and it vibrates fast. A quartzdriven clock can accurately chop time into millionths of a second. But the biggest selling point for quartz is that its cheap. Thats because quartz is actually silicon commonplace sand, the second most abundant element on earth. For the first time, a material replaced a machine, opening a door to a new era of miniaturization. But silicon can do more than just mark time. Its a member of a strange class of elements called semiconductors found on the table of the elements. As the name implies, they occupy a middle zone between metals, which conduct electric current, and insulators, like rubber and plastic, which dont. Think of water flowing through a pipe. An insulator is like a pipe thats frozen electrons cant get through. Semiconductors are materials that change from freeflowing conductor to a frozen insulator and back again simply by zapping them with an electric current. Switches made out of semiconductors are called transistors, and their amazing on again, off again switching ability made the computer revolution possible. But how did they get to be so small . One great place to look for answers is intel, a pioneer in squeezing tiny transistors onto computer chips. Ive met a lot of scientists who talk about switches and semiconductors, and somehow theyre fulfilling the same function. But what is it . Stephen smith what were trying to build with a semiconductor is a switch. This is one from the wall, something youd use to turn on a light and turn off. And, in fact, when we push the switch up, we give an input, the light is the output. Pogue so, in science fair terms, a switch, then, lets electricity go through or stops it. Exactly, based on the input, we change the flow of electricity. Electricity on or off. Its the only language computers understand. When the switch is off, the computer reads a zero. When the switch is on, the computer reads a one. String a bunch of switches together and you can create a code. With just eight switches, you can represent any symbol on a keyboard. For a page, you need about 25,000 switches. 1. 4 million will get you a second of music. Photos need tens of millions. And videos . Were talking about tens of billions. The more switches, the more power. The story of the computer revolution is the story of the shrinking switch. Early computers used mechanical relays and vacuum tubes as switches. Building a machine with just a few thousand took up rooms of space. But the silicon transistor changed all that. Because its a material, not a machine, its easy to shrink. Smith well, the exciting part about silicon transistors is were actually using the Atomic Properties of the silicon. So rather than actually having to craft something, to build a switch, to build the pieces, to build a spring, i, actually, by doing some smart engineering, can get the electrons to flow by using the properties of the atom. And we brought some material to illustrate that. What we have here. You just happen to have a hunk of cheese lying around the lab . A hunk of cheese. So think of this as the silicon material. I can actually take a slice of that silicon and i can use the Atomic Properties of this slice to build those transistors. Ladies and gentlemen, the pentium cheesium five. Um, i understand it works really well with the computer mouse. You can use that. All right, so youre saying that one beauty of silicon is that you can cut it in half, and its still silicon. And you can slice it again, smaller and smaller and smaller, but it still does just as good a job of passing along the ones and zeros. Absolutely. And i can use those Material Properties until i get down to the size of only a few atoms of silicon. Wow. Which is not something you could do to make mechanical switches smaller, right . Like, if i wanted to make this smaller, you know, i cant just go like this. Wow . And you can have a smaller one. Clearly, this is not going to be a smaller, good switch. Right. laughing but this is silicon. It is a purified element that one mines. All right, so what does it look like in the computer, then . Well, by the time it gets to the computer, it actually is one of these devices. So this shiny surface is a piece of refined silicon. It has transistors built into it. Weve actually flipped it over so the transistors are on the other side and what you see is the back of that piece of silicon. And this is how many of those little on off switches . This is almost a billion transistors. Wow. Pogue a billion switches on a oneinch chip. Whats even more astonishing is that one of the founders of intel saw this coming. In the 60s, gordon moore predicted that the size of transistors would shrink by half every two years, each time doubling the number that could be squeezed onto a single chip. This idea is known as moores law. And it has proved to be incredibly accurate. But now, 50 years later, moores law may be finally running out of steam. The transistors that power our stuff are about as small as they can get unless scientists can come up with a new way of packing them ever more tightly together. To see one of those possible solutions, ive crossed the country to visit the ibm research and development. Kitchen . So this is moores law of italian cooking. Thats right. What were going to do is explain why its so important to get the transistors smaller and smaller. Pogue frances has a pretty appetizing way of visualizing this law and its limitations. Like pepperoni slices, the transistors on a silicon chip are flat. Okay, so heres our. Silicon wafer. Silicon wafer. Now these are the oldfashioned transistors. Theyre much larger and you can see that you cant put that many onto each wafer. So this would be a 1960 ipod . I think so, yes. This would be a 60s type of thing. So lets take off these old transistors and replace them with some new transistors. Oh, these are much smaller. Yes, these new transistors are much smaller. Technology has marched on. Thats right, its moores law in action. So, in other words, all we have to do is make the transistors smaller every year forever and our gadgets will always be more powerful and more compact. That would be wonderful, but we cant make our pepperoni slices much smaller than this. And these transistors are now packed together about as close as we can get them. Pogue the pizza party cant go on forever. Theres a limit to how small you can shrink the transistors. If you reduce the surface area of a transistor too much and place it too close to its neighbor, electricity starts to leak, causing a short circuit. Not good. Weve run out of area, so theres only one way to go, and thats upwards. Slim jims . Thats right. This is a vertical transistor. Instead of having flatter, smaller transistors, we go in the other direction. Excuse me, vertical transistors . Vertical transistors. With little toothpicks on the bottom . Thats just for demonstration purposes. Pogue by building vertical transistors, called nano wires, frances can increase surface area without bringing the transistors closer to together, so no short circuit. Ingenious. So this is what youre doing at ibm, youre making these . Thats right. Theyre called nano wires. And the real thing is about a million times smaller than this. A million times smaller . Thats right. Well, thatd be hard to see. Pogue theyre hard to see, but this is not a nano wire. This is a silicon sliver frances uses as a surface to grow them. Ross we get tens of millions of wires on each of these specimens. Come on now youre hurting my brain. Pogue she carefully loads the wafer into a molybdenum clip and slides it into a custombuilt oven where shell bake it at 1,100 degrees fahrenheit. You know what i was just thinking, frances . I dont think you have enough aluminum foil on this oven. Ross yes, its the question everyone asks. It holds the heat better. Aluminum foil . Thats what we use. Isnt that a little low tech . Thats right, whatever works. Pogue oh, my gosh. So those little spires. Ross those are the nano wires. So you bake those up . We just grew these, yes. Pogue we can see them because this oven doubles as an electron microscope. All right, so these are them, huh . Ross this is 30,000 times magnified. Pogue 30,000 times . thats right. So heres the column of silicon thats the nano wire and heres the gold droplet on the end that actually makes it grow. Its weird, it looks like matchsticks or weird mushrooms. They do, mushrooms. Thats right, they look to me like mushrooms. Pogue thats amazing. Ross so were trying different catalysts, different recipes, but this here is the future of transistors. Pogue wow. While scientists like frances try to find ways to push silicon to its limit, others are pinning their hopes on a new material that lets electrons flow a thousand times faster than they can in silicon. Its ultra thin and super strong, and its called graphene. Pablo jarilloherrero when graphene happened, i just couldnt stop myself from going into it. It was so beautiful, i just couldnt stop. I immediately jumped onto it. Pogue this is dr. Pablo jarilloherrero, a professor at mit and graphene guru. Jarilloherrero here i have graphene. Graphene is the thinnest material that exists. This is just one atom thick sheet of graphene. And you can see that its perfectly visible. So, its part of the magic of graphene that you can just see it, even with your eyes. Pogue you heard that right this gray square of graphene is just a single atom thick. Although graphene was first discovered only recently, its been hiding in plain sight for ages in a material you probably have on your desk graphite, also known as pencil lead. Jarilloherrero you can write with a pencil because graphite is a layered material. And as you write, you are leaving traces of these layers on your piece of paper. So graphene is really just one sheet of this graphite material, a one atomthick sheet. Pogue that makes graphene an ideal conductor. At only one atom thick, theres nothing to restrict free electrons, which flow across the surface of the material like water across flat ice. Jarilloherrero graphene is a very special conductor, is the best conductor, and were now studying those properties and learning how fantastic this material is. Pogue and scientists have also figured out how to make transistors out of graphene, giving it the ability to speak the language that electronics and computers understand. Jarilloherrero so, im excited. Its beautiful. Here you have a material that will enable ultra highspeed electronics working at very low power. Pogue but it gets even better. Turns out the only tool you need to make graphene is a piece of tape. Jarilloherrero it is so simple any High School Student can indeed make one atomthick devices with this. Its really amazing. That scotch tape is going to be folded into two, and then when we separate the tape, this graphite naturally exfoliates into two pieces. Then were going to fold it again to split into four pieces. Then eight, do it again. And again, making the piece of graphite thinner and thinner and thinner, basically until we cover the entire tape with graphite. Were then going to take a silicon chip, deposit it on top of the tape. And what were hoping is that the graphite pieces, which are on the tape, are going to get in intimate contact with the silicon. So when you remove the chip and you look then with optical microscope, you can see the one atomthick material. And thats graphene. Pogue graphene promises to make the impossible possible letting electrons move across its surface at virtually the speed of light and generating almost no heat. In fact, graphene is such a revolutionary material that in 2010, a mere six years after its discovery, the two russian scientists who first made it received the nobel prize in physics. The computer chips of tomorrow could be a quantum leap Forward Computers with nearly limitless processing power; every book ever written stored on a tiny chip; a highway system so smart it could control millions of cars without a single accident. And its not just about our gadgets, its about us. While the electronics story continues to unfold in amazing ways, the story is beginning all over again with a materials revolution in medicine. Its not a new idea. Remember this . Man phase one calls for miniaturizing a submarine and injecting it into the carotid artery. Pogue fantastic voyage. It was the scifi smash of 1966. Man phase one. Phase one. Pogue scientists shrink a team of doctors and send them into a sick mans body on a mission to cure him. Man all stations stand by. Inject. Pogue today, as our devices get smaller and smaller, fantastic voyage is beginning to look like prophecy, the kind of thing that can change lives. Hi, courtney, how are you . Hi, dr. Mishkin, how are you . Good, yourself . Pogue today courtney will be taking a pill, but its not just any pill. Its a miniaturized camera. This capsule is a miniaturized camera. Every time it blinks its actually taking a picture. Its acquiring images at a rate of two frames per second. Okay. And what im going to get you to do is actually to swallow the capsule. And as the capsule goes through the gi tract, its going to be taking pictures of whats going on inside. Pogue its called the pillcam and it travels through the body just like a piece of food, taking 55,000 pictures over the course of eight hours. Why dont we actually put it inside your hand. Pogue pictures that can provide a diagnosis that once would have required surgery. As you move it around, we can actually see the folds of your hands with excellent magnification. So once we actually go ahead and ingest the capsule, its going to give us that same magnification of whats going on inside. Wow, thats really cool. It actually has a wireless transmitter thats going to transmit the images to a data recorder that youre wearing over the course of the day. And im going to download the images and be able to look at them and analyze exactly whats going on. Pogue the pillcam is made of an inert plastic that doesnt create a toxic response in the body. Inside is a minicatalog of the Electronics Industry a tiny video camera and flash, a radio transmitter, a battery, and, of course, a computer chip to drive it all. 25 years ago, all of those components would have taken up a cubic yard of space. Today it all fits inside a oneinch capsule that weighs only a fraction of an ounce. So lets go ahead and ingest it. Okay. Ready, into your mouth. Ill give you a glass of water. So now i see your teeth. And go ahead, down the hatch. Okay, great. So thats it, thats the hardest part. Okay. Just remember, over the next two hours do not drink anything. Okay. Pogue as the pillcam moves through courtneys digestive tract, it records what it sees, eventually giving dr. Mishkin a frontrow seat as he looks for abnormalities. Mishkin right now were looking at the small intestine. Its able to see 360 degrees such that its like looking down a gun barrel. The capsule is great at acquiring images, but im hoping that as the next genera