over 30 years Taiwan underwent massive
industrialization in what has become
known as the Taiwan miracle huge tech
firms grew becoming household names Asus
HTC Acer and the center of this was the
semiconductor industry led by a company
you've probably never heard of TSMC it's
one of the largest semiconductor
manufacturers in the world producing the
chips inside some of the best phones
including the iphone 11 it is most
likely if you have a smartphone you have
something made by TSMC and these chips
were only made possible thanks to the
discovery of semiconductors why some a
contactor important or interesting
because it changes your life with
factories or fabs as they are known
across the globe the largest is here in
Taiwan and we've been granted exclusive
access to see just how those chips that
form the heart of our electronic devices
are created but before we could go into
the fab it was quite a process to
undergo I have to take my shoes off on
the carpet Locker it saves and that was
just the start I had to put on a hair
net wash my hands and wear this to keep
the dust out cute but it is time for an
air shower
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the manufacturing of wafers has to be
extremely precise they cannot tolerate
any particles they may fall onto the
wafer and damaged the chips
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so finally we were allowed in the
factory and there was a good reason for
all of that faff the speed of these
chips relies on how many transistors you
can cram into a tiny space and when I
say tiny I'm talking nanometers so even
specks of dust would matter I don't
really know how to describe how fine
that five nanometer or seven nanometer
is but I think people very often say if
you look at xx a nanometer it was like
one thousands of a the diameter of a
human hair in this fully automated
Factory the lights are kept yellow to
protect the product and the machinery is
moving all around but there are quite a
few things in here we're not allowed to
film because this is seriously
cutting-edge technology so it needs to
remain pretty secret we have to protect
our customers information whichever way
we we can and so basically we do not
allow cameras to freely roam inside our
fab is because inevitably they may pick
up customer information
between all the automated devices in
this facility they travel 400,000
kilometers a day to put that into
context that 10 times around earth all
of this is about the concept of keeping
up with Moore's law as predicted by
Intel engineer Gordon Moore in the 60s
he refers to the doubling of transistors
on a chip every 2 years whilst the cost
is carved a concept increasingly hard to
keep up with despite us expecting a lot
more from our ever connected lives the
next driver is what we call ubiquitous
computing it is computation everywhere
at anytime all the devices are connected
billions and billions of edge devices
that are smart that can compute at any
time and communicate and link and that
would be the future enabled by
semiconductors