Silicon Insider: High Tech Thrills Ahead

Sept. 25, 2002 -- Three stories plus three "gates" equals a turn of the technological wheel.

The last couple weeks have seen a burst of semiconductor stories in the media. All three of them, two of which appeared on Sept. 11, came from Intel.

Even as semiconductor stock prices were falling, these stories were a vivid reminder that, recession or boom, the pace of technological change never flags in this bellwether industry.

For that we can breathe a sigh of relief — because it means that the engine of our economic growth has been spinning away despite market crashes and terrorist attacks. There will be another economic boom — guaranteed.

New Chips Mean New Products

The first of the stories covered Intel's announcement of its next generation chip, codenamed Banias, for laptop computers.

Banias will run at 1.3-1.7 gigahertz; that is, about one and one-half billion computations per second. That's actually about the speed of the current generation of laptop processors. But the new device will run on much less power, meaning not only better performance, but longer battery life.

For the short-term health of the chip industry, that's good news. Every new generation of chips also means a new generation of products.

Banias will help give laptops the performance currently found in desktop computers. Desktops will follow soon thereafter with a new generation of Pentiums and Athlons, giving them the performance currently found in the hottest Alienware-type game PCs.

The latter will then tweak these new chips into the 3+ GHz range, making possible stunning new forms of high-graphics games and animation.

That was the gist of the second story. In this one, Intel announced that its new 90 nanometer chip technology — meaning line widths on the surface of each chip will be as small as 90 billionths of meter — will be ready next year.

In other words, the new Pentium — small, faster and more powerful — is already in the wings.

A Generational Shift Ahead?

And so the cycle will continue, for at least another turn.

In the next two years we will see new handhelds, laptops, desktop PCs and servers. By the same token, we will also see more sophisticated versions of our current games and application programs.

After a quarter-century, this process remains both magical and profound.

But even more intriguing is the possibility that the greater performance of these new chips — and the bargain basement price of those they displace — will lead some clever inventor to devise a fundamentally new product or program of the magnitude of the PC, the Internet or the video game.

Those earth-shaking inventions were, after all, products of just such chip generational shifts. Such an invention would short-cut the return to prosperity.

The new Intel chip is welcome news, but we've grown inured to such miracles. Moore's Law has defined our lives now for a generation; we have assimilated its metronome into every corner of our society.

Rather, what would be truly stunning — terrifying, actually — would be if Moore's Law were to suddenly stop. Were this to happen, the semiconductor industry would be the first to freeze, followed in a deadly cascade by systems, consumer electronics, software, defense, manufacturing and services.

The resulting technology doldrums might well create a world economic stasis that could last for a generation.

A Roadmap of Innovation

So, what are the odds of that happening?

People connected with high tech have been asking this question for 30 years, almost since Gordon Moore first elaborated his law.

But it was Moore himself who first asked the right question, in 1992, which was: What obstacles to the Law can we identify ahead of us, and how can we systemically overcome them?

The result was the Technology Industry Roadmap. Under the auspices of the Semiconductor Industry Association, a team of experts gathers every two years to look at the next 15 years of chips, identify roadblocks, and develop strategies to meet them.

Working from this map, corporate and university researchers can pursue specific projects, equipment makers like Applied Materials can plan their new tools, and customers from Apple to Nintendo to the U.S. Air Force, can plan future products.

In any industry, such a roadmap would be an accomplishment. In as a fractious, cutthroat and complex a business as semiconductors, it is among the most greatest achievements of the digital age.

One of the most satisfying features of recent roadmaps is the realization by the reader that not only has the semiconductor overcome what were once thought to be all-but-fatal, but that the challenges don't seem nearly so insurmountable.

Barring some unexpected collision with particle physics, Moore's Law is going to keep rolling along for another dozen years or more.

A Decade of Thrills Ahead

The third story was a confirmation of that fact. In it, Intel announced that it was developing a tri-gate transistor technology — that is, it had found a way to stuff three on/off switches into a single transistor, instead of the usual one.

When achieved this will not only mean better performance, but because it will reduce the growing problem of current leakage across transistors, it will allow for even greater miniaturization.

This story was itself a follow-on to one earlier story covering Intel's announcement of its work on the first terahertz chips — that is, one trillion computations per second; and, a second story, from Advanced Micro Devices and IBM, announcing an equally powerful new dual-gatetransistor. All of these projects are targeted for completion about 2010.

In other words, we have at least another decade of high-tech thrills. Now you know why, after two years of misery, the chip industry is now hinting that next year's growth may be 20 percent to 30 percent.

Those stocks are starting to look like a bargain now, aren't they?

Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” is editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised. For more, go to Forbes.com. And you can talk back to Silicon Insider via e-mail.