The chip on the board

Under a metal plate the size of a stamp sits the most complex object ever mass-produced. Lift the shield: underneath, a dark square, the processor. A recent high-end phone processor holds about 19,000,000,0001 transistors, that many tiny switches, a number nobody can picture. The board was assembled on a line in Shenzhen, Vietnam or India, where robots place hundreds of components a minute. The processor itself arrived already finished, on a reel, like any other part. We are going to follow its journey backwards, all the way to the rock.