Huge tech firms grew becoming household names.

ASUS, HTC, Acer.

At the center of this is the semiconductor industry led by a company you've probably never heard of: TSMC.

It's one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world, producing the chips inside some of the best phones, including the iPhone 11.

It is most likely if you have a smartphone, you have something made by TSMC.

And these chips were only made possible thanks to the discovery of semiconductors.

Why's semiconductor important or interesting?

Because it changes your life.

With factories or fabs, as they're known, across the globe, the largest is here in Taiwan.

And we've been granted exclusive access to see just how those chips that form the heart of our electronic devices are created.

But before we could go into the fab, there was quite a process to undergo.

I have to take my shoes off the carpet.

And put them in the locker it seems.

And that was just the start.

I had to put on a hair net, wash my hands, and wear this to keep the dust out.

Phew, but it is time for an air shower.

Weird, I feel like I'm in the tumble drier.

Manufacturing of wafers has to be extremely precise.

They cannot tolerate any particles.

That may fall onto the wafer and damaged the chips.

So finally we were allowed in the factory, and there was a good reason rule of that faff.

The speed of these chips relies on how many transistors you can cram into a tiny space.

And what I say tiny, I'm talking nanometers, so even specks of dust would matter.

I don't really know how to describe how fine that five nanometer or seven nanometer is, but I think people very often say, if you look at 28 nanometer, it was like one thousandth of a...the diameter of a human hair.

In this fully automated factory, the lights are kept yellow to protect the product, and the machinery is moving all around.

But there are quite a few things in here.

We're not allowed to film because this is seriously cutting edge technology, so it needs to remain pretty secret.

We have to protect our customers information.

Whichever way we we can.

And so, basically, we do not allow cameras to freely roam inside our fab is because, inevitably they may pick up customer information.

Between all the automated devices in this facility, they travel 400,000 kilometers a day.

To put that into context, that's 10 times around Earth.

All of this is about the concept of keeping up with Moore's law.

As predicted by Intel engineer Gordon Moore in the 60s, it refers to the doubling of transistors on a chip every two years, whilst the cost is halved.

A concept increasingly hard to keep up with, despite us expecting a lot more from our ever connected lives.

The next driver is what we call ubiquitous computing.

It is computation everywhere at any time.

All the devices are connected.

Billions and billions of edge devices that are smart, that can compute at any time and communicate and link.

And that would be the future enabled by semiconductors.