Why the [Marketing Term] "Angstrom Era" is B.S.

Created 2026-02-04

Intel's Roadmap

You may have seen Intel's plan to continue advancement in semiconductor fabrication, through the "3 nanometer" node into the "20 Angstrom" node and beyond. But have you ever stopped to think about what that number actually measures? If not, then you're not missing out on anything because it actually doesn't measure any real dimension of the transistors of the process node. It's actually just purely a marketing term that helps companies easily convery to the rest of the semiconductor industry how much improvement they have provided from one node to the next (improvement in what? yeah. that's a good question).

So when did it stop measuring anything?

About 1999, with the introduction of the 180 nm node. Previously the node number used to refer to the minimum gate length of the transistors, but with the 180 nm node,