They are used in the electronic devices we use every day. Our computers, our phones, our televisions, and even our cars. They are microchips. Microchips are tiny electronic circuits. These small chips send and receive signals as electrical pulses and rapidly do complex calculations on these signals. The microchips inside your computer receive input when we type on a keyboard, move a mouse, or receive data from the internet. The microchip you are seeing now is from a normal desktop computer. The job of this chip is to act like an electronic middleman. The chip interprets input from another part of the computer, like the keyboard, and sends this output to the main brains of the computer, a microchip called the central processing unit. As we zoom further in, we need to use a scanning electron microscope or SCM, and the small gold wires will now appear to be huge white columns. These wires are the chip's link to the outside world. They provide power to the chip and also send signals to and from the chip. Now we see a well organized landscape. The gridded pathways are tiny metal wires. Electrical pulses trouble along these wires to go between different parts of the chip. These wires are the rows and highways of the microchip world. As we get closer, some pathways cross over others. This is because microchips are layered. This chip, which was made in the late 90s, has only four layers, while modern chips will have 12 or more. All of these pathways lead to transistors, the basic building block of a microchip. From these simple building blocks, complex functionality can be built. For example, circuit second ad, subtract, multiply, or divide numbers. The pathways and transistors are about 1 micron or 1000 nanometers across. The amazing thing is that by modern standards, this is huge. Newer chips often use transistors that are as small as 20 nanometers. This means that if we removed one of the old 1 micron transistors, we could fit 2500 modern transistors in its space. And it's a good thing that transistors are so tiny because a modern microchip in your laptop can contain over 1 billion transistors. Advances in nanotechnology have not only made microchips smaller and faster, but also more energy efficient.