tech companies

 Good to know.

The way tech companies continue to deliver ever-faster and more capable computers is undergoing a profound change—at the atomic level.

Performance gains that were for decades accomplished mostly by shrinking the individual components on microchips—often described as Moore’s Law—are now increasingly the result of materials science, which is evolving faster than it has in decades. Santa Clara-based Applied Materials, founded in 1967, a year before Intel, is the biggest of the companies that are leading the way.

It’s a change born of necessity. Chip makers are bumping up against a hard limit on how tiny the elements on chips can become, as some of their features can now be measured at the scale of just a few atoms.

As a result, manipulating what materials are in these tiny machines, and how they’re connected to one another, has become a primary way that engineers can continue to make them faster and more capable.

Applied Materials AMAT 0.72%increase; green up pointing triangle and its rivals Lam Research, Tokyo Electron and KLA, are, to one degree or another, materials science firms. Materials science is an interdisciplinary field, as much structural engineering as chemical engineering, that’s all about coming up with new compounds, and new ways to use them.

Applied Materials also invents new manufacturing processes, and makes the equipment that can put those processes into effect inside the extraordinarily complicated and expensive factories for microchips known as fabs. As the features on microchips have shrunk, the tolerance for error has also shrunk, the number of steps required to make them has increased, and the cost of each generation of fab grows by a factor of ten. The price tag for building a new one is now in excess of $10 billion.