A fun fact on the wikipedia page for the metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor:
it is the most frequently manufactured device in history, and the total number manufactured from 1960-2018 is 13 sextillion.

That's 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Though this picture is a bit misleading.

Even with devices this small, we couldn't make 13 sextillion of them in 60 years.
So imagine a chip like this. It's the 555 timer, which is one of the most popular integrated circuits ever made.

In 2017, it was estimated a billion are made every year.
And at the heart of it is the die, which looks like this:
(from Ken Shirriff's blog)
https://t.co/mz5PQDjYqF
And that's fundamentally a bunch of CMOS transistors (along with some diodes and resistors), which are a type of MOSFET. How many of them are on a 555?

about 25. Not many, but it's a very simple chip.
so that's a 25 billion mosfets a year right there, on one very simple chip designed back in 1971.
So how do you get to 13 sextillion?
Simple: Modern CPUs have a fuckton of these.
Like... The Nintendo Switch! It's powered by a Nvidia Tegra X1.
There's no specs on that specific chip that I can see, but the Tegra Xavier (Which is effectively the Tegra X3) has 7 billion transistors.
And Nintendo has sold something like 70 million Switches.
So even if the X1 only has 1/7th as many transistors as the Xavier, that's still 70 quadrillion transistors.
And you wanna know the funny part?

That's a rounding error. The CPU/GPU chip is only a small percentage of the number of transistors in the Switch.
and you might think AHA! THE SCREEN!

One way to make LCDs is with Thin-film transistors, where there's actually a transparent MOSFET layer which each individual subpixel has a transistors.
and with 1280x720 pixels and 3 colors, that's... only about 3 million transistors.

So it's not the screen.
So one of the most important developments in electronics was the floating-gate MOSFET, discovered in the late 60s.
This is where you build a MOSFET where instead of acting like a switch, the gate electrically isolated, and doesn't easily change.
You use the lovely sounding "hot-carrier injection" to charge up the gate. This is where you basically overpower insulation around the gate, allowing some electrons to force their way through.
Then you use a quantum-mechanical effect called field electron emission to read the data back out.

Basically you can run a current through the mosfet, and based on if it was charged or not, it'll have a different threshold voltage.
The problem is that to write back to this floating-gate MOSFET, you need a lot more electricity to cause it to breakdown the isolation temporarily and let the charge leak out. This damages it over time and results in a limited lifespan...
But the effect where you run a lot of current through it and it reaches a level that causes the isolation to break down and suddenly the charge all leaks out at once... it reminded someone of a camera flash.
So this type of data storage was called "Flash memory".

And it's taken over the world in the 41 years since it was invented.
But here's the thing about flash memory:
You need at minimum one MOSFET for every single bit you store, plus a bunch more to handle addressing and writing and erasing and controlling.
And back to the Nintendo Switch: It's got 32 gigabytes of built in storage.
That's not a lot. Your computer or phone probably has at least 4 times that much.
But how many transistors is 32gb of flash?

Somewhere around 35 billion.
It's also got 4 gigabytes of (D)RAM.

So that's another 4 billion transistors.
But yeah, add all those together, plus any secondary chips on the Switch, and it's gonna be something like 50-100 billion transistors.
And Nintendo has sold 70 million of those.
So now think about how many desktop computers there are, and how many phones, and how many smart devices (anything smarter than a toaster)...

So you may now see how we have made 13 SEXTILLION MOSFETS
(BTW my explanation for how flash works is overly simplified: modern flash uses MLC tech, where instead of just storing one bit per MOSFET, multiple bits can be encoded by using different levels of charge)

More from foone

Everyone likes to forget this episode just because it's terrible, but we were really sleeping on inherent comedy in a unfreezing an investor 300 years in the future and having them discover we've transitioned to a moneyless post-scarcity utopia.


it's like a classic twilight zone episode.

in fact, it IS a twilight zone episode.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper, Season 2, episode 24.
Four criminals steal a million dollars of gold bars, then put themselves in suspended animation for a hundred years to hide from the law.

they wake up, then start killing each other from mistrust, then the last one dies in the desert, as he offers a gold bar to the driver of a passing car, asking for water and a ride into town

the confused driver walks back to his car with the bar, and his wife asks what the gold bar is.
he says something like "It's gold... they used to use this for money, before we figured out a way to manufacture it."
He tosses it away, and drives off.

More from Tech

The entire discussion around Facebook’s disclosures of what happened in 2016 is very frustrating. No exec stopped any investigations, but there were a lot of heated discussions about what to publish and when.


In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
The 12 most important pieces of information and concepts I wish I knew about equity, as a software engineer.

A thread.

1. Equity is something Big Tech and high-growth companies award to software engineers at all levels. The more senior you are, the bigger the ratio can be:


2. Vesting, cliffs, refreshers, and sign-on clawbacks.

If you get awarded equity, you'll want to understand vesting and cliffs. A 1-year cliff is pretty common in most places that award equity.

Read more in this blog post I wrote:
https://t.co/WxQ9pQh2mY


3. Stock options / ESOPs.

The most common form of equity compensation at early-stage startups that are high-growth.

And there are *so* many pitfalls you'll want to be aware of. You need to do your research on this: I can't do justice in a tweet.

https://t.co/cudLn3ngqi


4. RSUs (Restricted Stock Units)

A common form of equity compensation for publicly traded companies and Big Tech. One of the easier types of equity to understand: https://t.co/a5xU1H9IHP

5. Double-trigger RSUs. Typically RSUs for pre-IPO companies. I got these at Uber.


6. ESPP: a (typically) amazing employee perk at publicly traded companies. There's always risk, but this plan can typically offer good upsides.

7. Phantom shares. An interesting setup similar to RSUs... but you don't own stocks. Not frequent, but e.g. Adyen goes with this plan.

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