How do Transistors Work? How are Transistors Assembled Inside a CPU?

Go to http://brilliant.org/BranchEducation/ for a 30-day free trial and expand your knowledge. Use this link to get a 20% discount on their annual premium membership. 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. https://www.patreon.com/brancheducation Branch Education Website: https://www.branch.education Branch Education Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BranchEducation/ 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