So how small can a transistor actually get? And is smaller even still the goal?
"If you take a computer or your mobile phone and you were to pry it open, you will see that there is a printed circuit board," Suman Datta, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Georgia Tech, told Live Science.
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The smaller the transistors are, the more can fit on each chip and the greater the chip's speed and functionality. So how small have they gotten so far?
Transistors were once visible to to the naked eye, but have now been made orders of magnitude smaller than the width of a human hair. (Image credit: Bettmann via Getty Images)An illustration showing the small transistor made by Persson, Peña and their colleagues. (Image credit: Peña et al (2026). )
Two-dimensional semiconductors are electrically active materials that are only one or a few atoms thick, and because electrical current can be controlled more precisely in such a thin layer, they allow for smaller transistors than traditional silicon does.
Size isn't the only consideration; cost is important, too. It's enormously expensive up front to design and build a new chip. "We are as R&D-intensive as drug companies that spend billions of dollars developing one drug," Datta said. "It's a very similar business model."
Another consideration is energy efficiency. "If I'm adding more and more transistors onto that little piece of silicon, and at the individual transistor level, they don't become more energy efficient … then when I go from, let's say, 10 transistors to 20 transistors, my power budget has to be doubled, all things being equal," Datta said.
"So it's not just smaller, faster, cheaper, but also more energy efficient," Datta said. "You have to work on all the four vectors."
Is smaller still the goal in the age of AI?
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The quest for faster, more efficient chips is only getting more urgent with the explosive growth of AI. But smaller transistors and more powerful chips aren't just important for AI data centers; they also mean smaller, potentially cheaper consumer electronics.
So how small can transistors get? "We will do everything to make it as small as possible as long as we can control the physics," Datta said. "And as long as we can, we will find a way to make the economics work."
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