Consumer Electronics Industry was almost dedicated to radio and television some 55 years ago.
Around 1980 a new trend began to emerge for electronic games and personal computers as well as calculators.
Now, we see consumer electronics in an exhausting list of products from refrigerators and washing machines to doorbells, and hot- carpets, dimmers, fans, and any programmable thing that uses electricity.
The secret behind that revolution is the evolution of gas and vacuum tubes into silicon semiconductors as a first step, then very large scale integration as the second step.
Now with nanotechnology advances so imminent, we expect a third phase in consumer electronics industry.
Things that were previously unimaginable could become economically feasible.
Imagine a pen for engineering, which could be programmed to to deliver lines between 0.1 mm to 2 mm with steps of 0.1 mm.
Imagine an all in one wrist watch digital assistant that you can program by a laptop link to give you unlimited alarms per day, per week, per month or per year, besides being a mobile telephone, a television and a GPS too.
Along with a pendant hanging from your necklace that acts as a power store and an in pack connector, recharging would take less than 30 seconds. You wrist watch digital assistant would be functional at the middle of the ocean or in the jungle or in the desert, not only in cities.
Someone will come up with an idea to uplink your futuristic WWDA to display detailed maps or even satellite live view of the district in which you stand.
Is there a limit to human imagination with the ongoing technological achievements?
I heard recently on a radio show that the computer chip is fast reaching it capacity;ie how many circuits on each square of the chip, and so the speed and variety of the function will reach its limit. what we do with the chip is still to be explored.
stuart
The true revolution is not in the scale, which is rather an evolutionary gain.
The revolution is already established in the programmability of the consumer electronic devices and the conditional performance that maximises operability and adaptation to variations.
That is why, while scale evolution might be coming to a point of saturation, the programmability applications are far from being exploited as an enhancement of devices.
We shall witness integrated intelligent homes, offices, streets, and transportation in the upcoming decade. _________________ Hemetis
The capacity of computer chips (known as Moore's Law) is by no means coming to an end. It has at least a good 30 years left. However, what will happen is that the period of doubling will increase. Moore's original paper stated that the doubling period was every year. That has now slipped to a little shy of 2 years. Once computer circuits reach the atomic level, the chips themselves will grow in size according to Moore's Law.
It is extremely interesting and quite predictable that nanotechnology will forcefully bring the electronic circuit density to its maximum within 2006, consequently, the maximum operating frequencies shall be reached.
Then rather than who to integrate, the design question will be what to integrate?
The sequential paradigm is exploited but the parallel paradigm is not yet exploited. Again, nanotechnology will come to the rescue the industry by making the manufacturing process of integrated circuits reach perfection allowing address and data busses to reach 512 and 1024 lines in parallel. _________________ Hemetis
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