4주차｜기술·ICT·정보보안·AI_신효민_ The most important piece of technology in your life

[신효민]

Title: The most important piece of technology in your lifetime is this tiny chip

speaker: Chris Miller

date: 2026. 2. 20

words: 712

[Slightly edited]

glossary

1. Chris Miller, a professor at The Fletcher School 크리스 밀러, 플레처 학교 교수
2. transistor: 트랜지스터 (전류나 전압 흐름을 조절하여 전기 신호를 증폭하거나 스위칭[켜고 끄기] 하는 반도체 소자[device])
3. circuit: 회로
4. radio wave: 전파
5. silicon wafer: 실리콘 웨이퍼
6. the Earth’s crust: 지각
7. boron: 붕소
8. gallium: 갈륨
9. gallium arsenide: 갈륨비소

When we think about technology, we think about social media, search engines, and apps on our phones. But behind all of these technologies are chips.

The technology we use today is possible because chips get better and better every year. So, I think we have misunderstood what technology really means. We usually think about the easier part, which is writing software. But the difficult part is actually manufacturing the chips that improve computing power and allow us to have computers in our phones or connect devices to the internet.

All of this has been made possible by better semiconductors.

I’m Chris Miller, a professor at The Fletcher School.

I first became interested in chips when I realized that you really couldn’t understand how the world works without understanding them.

You can walk around your house and see that there are chips in almost every device you use. You can also look at major changes in international trade, where semiconductors are among the most widely traded goods. Or you can look at global politics, where competition between the U.S. and China is increasingly focused on technology. Chips are at the center of all these major trends.

A chip is a piece of silicon, often about the size of your fingernail. Inside it are thousands, millions, or sometimes billions of tiny devices called transistors. These transistors switch circuits on and off.

When they are on, they produce a one. When they are off, they produce a zero.

All the ones and zeros used in computing and data storage—including your Instagram likes and text messages—are simply long strings of ones and zeros. They are created by circuits on a chip switching on and off.

There are several different types of chips. Some chips process data, while others store data. A third type converts real-world signals, such as sounds or images, into ones and zeros so that they can be processed or stored.

When we look at the world, we see images. But when a phone uses its camera to look at the world, it receives rays of light and converts them into ones and zeros that can be stored.

There are special sensors for images, sound, and radio waves. These sensors use semiconductors to convert real-world signals into strings of ones and zeros. Those strings can later be turned back into images, for example, when you open a photo on your phone.

All of this is done by different types of semiconductors.

In general, chips are built on a base of silicon, but dozens of other materials are added on top to create transistors at such a tiny scale. A typical advanced chip may contain several dozen materials. Silicon is the main material, but many other chemicals are also used in the process.

It is true that sand contains silicon and chips also contain silicon, but that is where the similarity mostly ends.

The silicon used to manufacture chips is one of the purest materials we have. This is because, when you manufacture chips with tiny transistors, almost every atom must be placed correctly for the chips to work.

This means that if the silicon—or any other material being used—contains even a single atomic impurity, it can cause defects in the chip.

Producing the silicon wafers used in chip manufacturing therefore requires an extremely high level of purity.

Today, only four companies in the world are able to produce silicon wafers with the necessary level of purity and in the quantities required for modern manufacturing.

The good news is that silicon is found everywhere. It is one of the most common elements in the Earth’s crust.

The difficult part is refining and purifying silicon so that there are no impurities that could interfere with the manufacturing process.

On top of the silicon, chipmakers may use boron, gallium, gallium arsenide, and many other chemicals.

Every chipmaker has its own special manufacturing process, so we do not really know exactly what materials are used inside a typical chip. Chipmakers usually keep this information secret. It is their special sauce—the process that allows them to manufacture chips with the level of performance they want.

We are not going to run out of silicon, and we are also not going to run out of the other materials generally used in chipmaking.