Researchers have revived and improved a once-reliable technique to identify and count defects in transistors, the building blocks of modern electronic devices such as smartphones and computers.

You know the “just add a transistor” drill by now: a performance or functionality requirement comes up that you can’t support entirely using the blocks built into your favorite mixed-signal ...

The first transistor was about half an inch high. That's mammoth by today's standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology.