Drive around Silicon Valley and you will see surprisingly little skyline. The landscape is dotted with low-rise offices, bungalows and malls. The microchips that gave the region its name are built in much the same way. Millions of low-rise transistors—the electrical switches which instantiate a binary 1 or 0, and thus form the basis of computing—are plonked next to each other on a wafer of silicon.
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