21
2012
TECHNOLOGY TRENDS Part 1
An article by admin
TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
Multimedia devices and communications are becoming practical because of trends in electronics, telecommunications and displays. The continued progression of these technologies will play a determining role in what can be achieved in the next decade.
Elements: increasing Circuit Density
Besides co-founding Intel with Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore is probably best known in the semiconductor world for his profound prediction in 1964 of the growth rate of semiconductors. Mr. Moore predicted that the numbers of transistors on a chip will double every three years. While I can remember many years where I was sure that Moor’s Law would fall, it rarely has. Andrew Rappaport of the Technology Research Group at the 1990 Microprocessor Forum took this one step further. Mr. Rappaport stated that silicon is free. While many semiconductors vendors may disagree with this comment (others may say that the silicon is free, but the package the silicon goes into is not!), Mr. Rappaport’s claim is that technology has progressed so far that instead of being limited by the technology, we are limited by our ability to fill all of the available silicon with good ideas.
Communication: increasing Bandwidth and Switching Speed
Due to the advance in digital signal processing techniques, it is possible to produce low-cost 9600-baud V.32 modems. What is perhaps silly about this is that modem technology is trying to cope with phone lines from the 1950s, when in actuality the Bell System has not been standing still all these years. If the phone company’s trunks are already digital, why not tap into them directly?
One way is with a technology called Data Kit developed at Bell Labs. With a more appropriate (and lower tech) modems, it is possible to get 9600 baud (or better) full duplex data on the same twisted pair of phone wire and have this data be completely independent of the phone voice signal. It’s a low-end ISDN. The proposed ADSAL “Video Dial tone” service should work in a similar way, but at much higher bit rates and with modems that are much more expensive.
The largest leap forward in communications bandwidth, thought, is available with fiber optics, which, while requiring the replacement of the existing wiring, will lead to orders of magnitude more data capacity. A switching fabric for fiber optic data rates, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), is making gigabit rate packet switched fiber networks feasible. ATM is the basis for Broadband ISDN (B-ISDN) discussed in Chapter 13 and has also been proposed as the basis for future fiber optic CATV networks.
