BOSTON Nanotechnology will catapult the semiconductor industry into a new phase of relatively steady, sustained growth that will replace its historical boom-and-bust cycles, microprocessor veteran Nick Tredennick said Tuesday (Nov. 19) in a keynote at the Embedded Systems Conference here. Just as the increased circuit complexity posited by Moore's Law enabled the PC and its derivatives, nanotechnologies will enable ever more diverse embedded applications that will outnumber those spawned by the PC, Tredennick said.
"Moore's Law was never the driver of the industry," said Tredennick. "It actually was the enabler a speedboat that created the wave on whose crests rode the resultant microprocessors and the subsequent computers of the PC era."
Nanotechnologies are already being applied in storage applications, he said. NanoMagnetics (Bristol, U.K.) has developed a way to grow magnetic nanoparticles within a protein called ferritin, which is found in plants, animals and humans. The company has demonstrated areal density to more than 12 Gbits per square inch and hopes to double that by the end of 2002. That aim is in line with the National Storage Industry Consortium's plans to demonstrate a recoding density of 1 Tbit/inch2 by 2006.
Double-edged instruction set
Tredennick, who currently edits the DynamicSilicon industry newsletter, considers the introduction of the microprocessor some 40 years ago as having enslaved hardware design to the instruction set that is the underpinning of that device. "Essentially it eliminated the need for a state machine, a convenience but also a limiter in not being able to design needed functions straight in hardware."
Tredennick, who developed one of the earliest microprocessors, Motorola's 68000, as well as the later IBM Micro/370 architecture, defined instruction-based processors as "basically simulators of real-world activities. How much more elegant and simpler would it be, for instance, to have the image that a digital camera lens sees be transformed in a hardwired operation rather than being processed with image-software algorithms driven by the instructions of a microprocessor?"
With the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981, this "simulation world" trend spread into all aspects of computing, including embedded computing, which now consumes 45 times more processor units than PC applications. Soon embedded applications "will eclipse the PC as the focus of the industry," Tredennick said. "Semiconductor progress enables on-chip sensors and actuators with moving parts and it permits us to co-opt solutions from nature."
He asserted that somewhere between the 750-nanometer line widths of chips fabbed in 1991 and the predicted 22-nm chips to be produced in 2016 lies the sweet spot for the ideally sized transistor. "In theory we will be able to produce chips in 2016 where the gate oxide insulator is only 3 atoms thick, [but] economic factors will dictate that we start using the millions of available transistors to do some useful work," said Tredennick. That useful work will come from combining digital, analog and microelectromechanical systems all on a single chip.
Tredennick lauded "the rise of foundries and the increasing use programmable devices." With those developments in combination with the rise of nanotechnologies, "the industry will bloom with ever increasing solutions in the medical, automotive, communications and, of course, military areas," he said.