How do Transistors Build into a CPU? 🖥️🤔 How do Transistors Work? 🖥️🤔

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Inside your smartphone, there are billions of transistors, but have you ever wondered how they actually work and how they can be combined to perform tasks like multiplying two numbers together? One rather interesting thing is that transistors are a lot like Lego Bricks assembled together to build a massive Lego set, which we’ll explore further. In this video, we dive into the nanoscopic world of transistors. First, we'll see how an individual transistor works, then we’ll see how they are connected together and organized into logic gates such as an inverter or an AND gate. Finally, we’ll see how logic gates are connected together into large Macrocells capable of performing arithmetic.

Table of Contents:
00:00 - Inside your Desktop Computer
00:26 - Transistors are like Lego Pieces
01:09 - Lego Bricks vs Transistors and Standard Cells
02:12 - Examining the Inverter Standard Cell
03:24 - How do Basic Transistors work?
09:09 - Schematic for an Inverter Standard Cell
10:45 - Exploring the Macrocell
13:20 - Conceptualizing how a CPU Works
15:11 - Brilliant Sponsorship
16:55 - The NAND Standard Cell
20:35 - A Surprisingly Hard Script to Write
21:42 - The AND Standard Cell
23:16 - The Exclusive OR Standard Cell
23:54 - CMOS Circuit
24:27 - Understanding Picoseconds
25:51 - Special Thank You and Outro


We're working on more ambitious subjects like How Computers Work.
Any contribution would greatly help make these videos.   / brancheducation  
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A special thank you goes to Matt Venn for helping to provide the accurate standard cell layouts. He runs the Zero to ASIC Course YouTube channel as well as TinyTapeout where you can build your own integrated circuit. Another special thank you goes to Maximo Balestrini who built the GDS to Blender Rendering.

Lead Animator: Parvesh Khatri
Animation Director: Mike Radjabov
Research, Script and Editing: Teddy Tablante
Twitter: @teddytablante
Modeling: Prakash Kakadiya
Image Editing: Randy Catequista
Animation Contribution: Andrew Alalibo, Aaron Pozzer
Voice Over: Phil Lee
Sound Design by Drilu: www.drilu.studio
Sound Design and Mix: Luis Huesca

Erratum:

Wikipedia contributors. "Application-specific integrated circuit", "Integrated Circuit", "Logic Gate", "Standard Cell". Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, Visited June 20th 2025

#Transistor #Logic #CPU