Without microchips there would be no calculators, no PCs and no laptops. The wafer-thin chips – also called integrated circuits – store countless amounts of information.

Microchips are made of silicon and their production is very time-consuming. In order to create the actual conductor paths, different techniques are used to superimpose foreign matter such as aluminum or copper onto the silicon surface. Each particle of dust is one too many: where almost a billion transistors are crowded together on just one square centimeter, any contamination, no matter how small, is disastrous.

The American electronics pioneer, Jack Kilby, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his groundbreaking work in 2000, is considered the inventor of the microchip. The physicist presented his microchip to the public in the laboratories of Texas Instruments as early as 1958. Five transistors which were soldered onto a piece of germanium to create a circuit – this first chip was the size of a paperclip.

The structures on the microchips became smaller and smaller. Chip manufacturers succeeded in doubling the number of transistors on a chip every 18 months as predicted by Moore’s law. However, as the size scale has now been reduced to that of atoms, manufacturers are increasingly coming up against the limits of miniaturisation. The time has come to try out completely new approaches. Therefore, researchers are now looking into solutions such as tiny “carbon nanotubes” which they hope to use on microchips in the future.