The first computer chip with a trillion transistors

SILICON CHIPS have lonely lives. They are born together, often as tens of thousands of identical siblings a few millimetres across, on a single wafer the size of an old-fashioned vinyl record. They are then broken from their natal wafers like squares of chocolate from a bar, and packaged individually in plastic and metal. Only after this is a chip reconnected to others of its kind, as the packages are wired up to work together on circuit boards and inserted into products.

Many inventors over the years have noted that if chips were instead wired together from the beginning, on the wafer itself, much expense and trouble would be avoided. But efforts to implement such wafer-scale integration have consistently failed, either because the technology just did not work or the resulting circuits could not compete with new versions of conventional designs.