ELECTRONICS: TOWARDS MINIATURIZATION
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Electronics changes rapidly and the trend toward miniaturization has continued too. The range of surface mount technology (SMT) components expands daily. Mobile phones and video cameras shrink steadily in size. The newly released FXI Cotton Candy is claimed to be the smallest PC in the world. Designed by Norwegian company FXI Technologies and is about the size of a normal USB stick, 8cm x 2.5cm and 21 grams. It performs most of the functions of its larger “colleagues”, including running the Windows and Linux operating systems.
But, as always, some developments that were heralded as major break-throughs, subsequently fail to live up to expectation or are superseded by later developments. Quadraphonic sound and bubble memories are two examples.
Another prediction, originating decades ago, has never been fulfilled. This was the belief that the advent of computing on a wide scale would lead to the “paperless office”. Observation of the desks of most present-day offices shows that, far from reducing the amount of paper consumed, computing has increased the demand for paper. “Hard copy” has a nice safe feel to it and a development that could help to bring it about has been made. Electronic ink has recently been demonstrated as a practical proposition.
Electronic ink and most other innovations in electronics are related to increasing computing power. The Blue Gene programme undertaken by IBM is aimed at producing a new computer architecture that will comfortably outperform all of today's machines. The new architecture is called SMASH, which is an acronym for Simple, MAny and Self-Healing. The system is simple because it is based on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing (technology)) processors. These processors have only 57 instructions compared with several hundreds in a Pentium.
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Such are the foreseeable developments in computer architecture, but what of future developments in electronics itself? Here the most likely forecast can be summed up in three words: smaller, faster, and smarter. The more significant aspect of size reduction is the miniaturization of the components themselves, to which we have already referred. Much research is aimed at making transistors smaller than ever, with the aim of packing more and more of them on the chip. New semiconductors, such as those based on gallium arsenide, promise to give us smaller, more densely packed transistors, leading to a new phase of larger-scale integration. Small size is not the sole aim of these researches; a densely-packed circuit has shorter connections between its components, which means that signals pass from one to the other more quickly.
Operating speed can be significantly increased. A parallel effect arises because smaller transistors have lower capacitance and switch states more rapidly and the power consumption is reduced as well. All of this encourages the use of microprocessors and other complex ICs in electronic systems, leading to an overall increase in “smartness” of all our electronic equipment. This trend is set to continue, and smaller-sized circuits also will be both faster and smarter and these three qualities go hand-in-hand.
Answer the following questions.
1.What is the smallest PC in the world?
2. What are examples of failed expectations?
3. Why is the idea of paperless office hasn’t still been fulfilled?
4. What is electronic ink and what is the purpose of its creation?
5. What does SMASH stand for?
6. What are peculiarities of RISC processors?
7. What do new gallium arsenide based semiconductors offer?
8. What do the words “…smaller, faster, and smarter…” refer to?
Exercises
