circuit would dominate electronics, underscoring that during the period such circuits were already high-performance devices and starting to become cheaper. This was made possible by a reliable manufacturing process, which involved the fabrication in a batch process. It employed photolithographic, mechanical, and chemical processing steps to create multiple transistors on a single wafer of silicon. The measure of this process was its yield, which is the ratio of working devices to those with defects and, given a satisfactory yield, a smaller transistor means that more can be on a single wafer, making each one cheaper to produce. Development Miniaturization became a trend in the last fifty years and came to cover not just electronic but also mechanical devices. By 2004, electronic companies were producing silicon integrated circuit chips with switching MOS transistors that had feature size as small as 130 nanometers (nm) and development was also underway for chips that are merely few nanometers in size through the nanotechnology initiative. The focus is to make components smaller to increase the number that can be integrated into a single wafer and this required critical innovations, which include increasing wafer size, the development of sophisticated metal connections between the chip's circuits, and improvement in the polymers used for masks (photoresists) in the photolithography processes. These last two are the areas where miniaturization has moved into the nanometer range. Miniaturization in electronics is advancing rapidly due to the comparative ease in miniaturizing electrical devices. The process for mechanical devices, on the other hand, is more complex due to the way the structural properties of its parts change as they shrink. It is said that the so-called Third Industrial Revolution is based on economically viable technologies that can shrink three-dimensional objects. See also Miniature helicopter Nanotechnology References External links Miniaturization - Glossary definition Industrial processes Technological change