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Exploring future technology
THE microprocessor is one of the greatest accomplishments of the twentieth century. No invention in the history of mankind has spread at this rate or has deeply touched so many aspects of human existence. Today there are nearly 20 billion microchips arebeing used in different fields, which suggest an average of two powerful computers for each man, woman and child on the planet.
In the face of this fact, it is quite obvious that the microprocessor is not only changing the products we use, but also the way we live, and, ultimately, the way we perceive reality.
Pre-microprocessor
Imagine a world in which the following things never existed: pasteurized milk, cutting edge medicines, air conditioning, laser surgery, airplanes, cell phones, CAT scans, etc. It was a world filled with tiny coffins and quarantine notices, injuries that too often turned fatal, frequent deaths during childbirth and a life expectancy of less than 60 years.
The microprocessor revolution is different in many ways. It is very complete, all encompassing and highly relentless. It has made change so omnipresent that change itself has become the leitmotif of our time. We no longer endure change; we are change. And, in the past quarter-century, the primary agent of that perpetual change has been the microprocessor.
Post-microprocessor
We are at such a point in time when almost everything associated with the old Industrial Age is falling into dysfunction and everything associated with the new Digital Age is booming exponentially.
This boom is just the beginning of the rapid spread of microprocessors: tiny computer chips that will be installed in almost all tools and appliances, making those tools smarter and more useful. Even our seemingly intractable social and political problems can be reinterpreted in this new light: That gridlock in Washington is more about the inability of our old centralized political institutions to adapt to the decentralized, fast-moving realities of our time. The failure of our schools is rooted in the obsolescence of a system that mass-produces brains in an era in which the world’s knowledge doubles every four years.
The economic anxiety comes from the rapid restructuring of the economy and workplace, which puts everyone’s career and livelihood at risk. But microprocessors do more than just traverse time; they preserve it as well. They enable us to study what was once too rare or too fragile for the eyes and hands of anyone but the expert. Through diagnostic tools they discover the agents of age and decay and offer the means to defeat them. With the means of databases they preserve and archive images that would otherwise be as lost as the eras they represent. Using analytic devices and design systems, they help us to preserve the works of humans, from the amazonian rain forests to Gaul’s cathedral, from cheetahs to a Cellini sculpture. Working in emergency rooms, they help to preserve young lives that might have become part of history far too soon.
Peeping through applications
Were we to strip away the microchip from every application in which it now finds a home, we would be both stunned and frightened by the immediate sense of loss. The modern kitchen appliances would stop humming, the televisions and VCRs would fade to black, the stereos would go mute and most of the clocks would stop. The cars would not start. Airplanes would be unable to leave the ground. The telephone exchange would go dead, as would most streetlights, thermostats, and, of course, more than a billion computers. And these are only the most obvious applications. Every factory in the industrial world would also shut down, as would the electrical grids, stock exchanges and the global banking systems. Let us go even deeper: pacemakers would stop too, as would surgical equipment and fetal monitoring systems in the obstetrics wards. All of this because of a loss of a tiny square of silicon, the size of a fingernail, weighing less than a postage stamp and constructed with just crystal, fire, water and metal.
Tens of thousands of microprocessors are built every day in the most sophisticated manufacturing plants ever known, where a single speck of dust can mean disaster, where processes occur in environments cleaner than any other place on earth. Even the water used to rinse the surfaces of the finished chips is purer than that used during open-heart surgery.
The modern microprocessor contains as many as a hundred million transistors, with each finished chip being the product of processes more complicated than those used by the Manhattan project in building the atomic bomb. Despite a highly sophisticated manufacturing process, microchips are produced at a rate of more than a billion each year. To put this complexity in perspective, imagine that within each tiny microprocessor there exists a structure as complex as a mid-sized city, including all its power lines, phone lines, sewer lines, buildings, streets and homes.
The industrial revolution, which irrevocably changed the world, was brought about by a 50-times improvement in productivity, a leap so prodigious that is turned the society upside down. It changed the nature of work and play, it transformed commerce, education medicine, government and religion. It led to new forms of history, literature and political theory. More important, it changed forever the way we look at ourselves and our families, and at time and the universe. But the microprocessor has already eclipsed that revolution. Evolution faster than any invention in history, the microprocessor’s capability has grown ten thousands-folds over the past 31 years.
The microprocessor industry has not only transformed the way devices work, it has also changed the nature of work itself. The men and women who design, manufacture and market microprocessors and all of the industries associated with these chips have created a unique global culture.
It is helping inventors propel humanity into an era of change the likes of which we have never known. It is not merely an invention, but a meta-invention which enables us to create yet other inventions. Thousands of new devices and products have been made possible by the existence of the microprocessor and by the embedded intelligence. It offers despite infinitesimal demands for space or power. Thus, it is not only giving us power over our own lives, it is also the greatest instrument for achieving freedom ever invented.
Applications
The microprocessor application has penetrated in all phases of our life, some of them in the following areas:
Home appliances: There is a wide application of microprocessors in devices used for entertainment purpose. Video, CD player, television, game controller, DVD, Handhelds, sound mixer to name a few, have made world of difference to our lives.
Communications: It has made great in roads in the domain of communication. Some of them include satellite system, telephone/ fax, digital signal transfer system, answering device, (GPS), etc.
Automobile: Today we have numerous microprocessors tucked away inside of car to control brakes, lock doors and to remind you to fasten your seat belt. Microprocessors have also paved the way for Electronic Fuel Injection (EPI) system in the cars to save 30 per cent fuel. The most advanced automobiles, today, has as many as 200 microprocessor controlled functions, a number sure to escalate in coming years.
Anti-crime gadgets: An automated identification system uses a computer database to compare fingerprints against millions of stored prints in only one an hour a search that would take more than 400 years to conduct manually.
Size really matters
As the size of the microchips is decreased and speed of working is to be increased the cost is dramatically decreased. Today you can buy greeting cards containing processors with more computing power than the world’s largest computers in the 70s.
Microprocessors are so ubiquitous and inexpensive that we now embed them under the skin of our pets sew them into clothing and attach them to light bulbs, running show, ski bindings and jewelry. In 1975, the Intel 8080 microprocessors cost about $300. It was powerful enough to run the Altar, the first PC. Today, that same price buys a sixth generation descendant of that chip, a Pentium 4 processor, with enough power to direct the pathfinder on its exploration of Mars, generate scenes for a computer-animated motion picture or manage a website receiving 10 millions hits per day.
As transistors become smaller, microprocessors become more powerful, by 2010, transistors will be so small that 2000 of them will fit across the width of a single human hair. Billion-transistor microchip will be common, and computers will come on a single microchip. Microchips containing ten thousand billion transistors will be available by 2050. However, the integrated circuits of microprocessors were smaller and cheaper than the mainframe computers.
Future
With Intel’s 0.13-micron process technology, it is possible to build circuits so small that 55 million transistors can be placed on each chip. It would take almost 1000 of these “wires” placed side-by-side to equal the width of a human hair. Intel’s 0.13-micron process technology featured the world’s fastest and smallest transistors (60 nanometers) used in volume production. These transistors are the foundation of the industry’s highest performance microprocessor.
Intel has made profitable use of the Moore’s Law which states that the number of transistors on a sliver of silicon will double after every 18 months. These transistors can switch on and off more than one trillion times per second. This speed makes them “terahertz” transistors.
Intel’s 20-nanometer (nm) transistors can switch on and off 1.5 trillion times per second. It would take a person 25,000 years to turn a light switch on and off that many times. Using the 20nm transistors, Intel expects to build 20GHz processors by 2007. Compare it with an airplane propeller which rotates at 100Hz (600RPM). These future processors will operate at one volt or less, consuming significantly less power per transistor than today’s processors, enabling them for use in battery-operated devices such as mobile computers and handheld devices. To built these future processors, Intel plans to use “extreme ultra violet” transistors, the next generation lithography technology.
Many futurists predict that seven generations from now, the descendants of these chips for the same price will construct software agent “avatars” with human characteristics that will act as our personal assistants, helping us to shop, planning our days and organizing our lives. These chips will also bring speech recognition to word processors and order entry systems. They will generate 3D wall-sized graphics for television, teleconferencing, even custom-made movies. They will direct our vehicles for maximum safety and create virtual worlds we will walk though. They will instruct our children, monitor our health, replace lost body parts and, through a grid of billion of sensors, connect us to the world in ways that we can only imagine.
By the year 2020, all this will have largely played itself out. By then your home may have 50 of these tiny computers connected to the information infrastructure, much as you now have 50 electric motors tied to the electrical grid powering your refrigerator, washing machine, dishwasher, blender, right down to the clocks on your wall.
It is estimated, that by 2020, the world’s richer countries would run as many as a hundred times more computers than people. In an age of smart machines, hidden microchips will be all around us, making so-called “dumb” objects behave intelligently. Microchips will be embedded in all kinds of devices and everyday objects from cars to food packaging. Cookers will “know” what they are cooking and buildings that require repairs will alert engineers automatically.
Smart cards-like credit cards but with a microchip inside- will be commonplace, communicating by radio with the external world. Personally coded so that no-one else can use then, smart cards will open locked doors, carry data such as medical records and, of course, be used for payment.
Intelligent devices will perform many different tasks in the home by 2020. Robots will serve drinks to guests and therapy beds will provide massage and other treatments. By 2010, it is expected that robot explorer will bring back dust from a comet and visit Pluto, the outermost planet in the solar system.
As robots become more intelligent an versatile, they will reach the point where they begin to design and build improved versions of themselves. Some futurists predict that by 2100, robots may even have become the most intelligent form of life on Earth.
Today, most home computes are still deaf, dumb and blind-unable to sense, let alone react to, the outside world. But in the near future, computers will be able to interact fully with their users. They will recognize our gestures, detect our body heat and carry out voice commands. They will even be able to check our health and alert a doctor if they think we need one.
By 2010, high- powered computers will work so quickly- a million billion calculations a second- that wire connections will be useless. Only light rays will move fast enough to carry data inside these “optical” machines. By 2050, quantum computers will use and manipulate sub-atomic particles. These will solve in seconds problems that can take years of work by today’s supercomputers.
By 2020, most homes in the richer countries will be joined to the communications network by two-way optical links, carrying high-quality sound and video for phones, multi-channel television and radio, and other information services. The transmission of people through space, or teleportation, will still be impossible by 2015 but the holographic telephone will be the next best thing. Holophones will use lasers to re-create in real-time a realistic 3D image of the person at the other end of the line.
In the next ten years radio communication will be common inside homes and offices as will. The familiar tangle of cables that connect computers, printers and other devices will disappear as more and more equipment becomes cordless, and data is sent and received instead by short-range radio links.
This will all become possible with a new generation of satellite that will circle the Earth in much lower orbits, crossing the sky from horizon to horizon in just a few minutes. There will be so many satellites that wherever you are on the Earth there will always be one within range to handle your mobile phone calls or connect you to the internet.
New avenues
Fleets of new satellites will make this super-Net accessible anywhere on the Earth. Many experts believe the internet will soon carry the world’s telephone calls using voice over IP and much of its television and radio broadcasting as well.
By 2020, many new homes will have intelligent security systems, connected by radio to a wide range of sensors hidden around the building. As well as detecting intruders and the first signs of smoke, a computerized system will monitor air and water pollution, and warm of harmful bacteria in the kitchen and other dangers around the house.
By 2025, according to some experts, it will be possible to predict exactly when earthquakes and other natural disasters are going to happen. It might even be possible to prevent some of the more devastating effects caused by them. Scientists, for example, may be able to stop earthquakes by pumping water into fault lines to prevent potentially catastrophic stresses from building up.
By the middle of the next century, the typical microprocessor may have more computing power that today’s fastest supercomputers. It will talk, more important, it will listen. The relationship we have with it will change in almost unimaginable ways. Yesterday, the microprocessor was a tool. Today, it is a partner. And who knows what vital role it will play in our lives in the years to come?
Dr B S Chowdhry
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