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The Business Case



                  Semiconductor technology must operate not only in accordance with the laws of physics, but also in accordance with the laws of the marketplace, and the market is less bullish than it used to be. Many industry leaders say that we should forget about the relentless drive to microminiaturization. No one really knows what to do with the level of integration we have today.

                  In the good old days, large systems helped pay for DRAM, logic, and microprocessor development. Now, more and more, developers are relying on PCs to pay the bills. While it would be wonderful to make 16-Gb DRAMs and billion-transistor microprocessors, where is the business case? There are already two generations of DRAMs sitting on the shelf. At this rate, we may not see the 1-Gb DRAM for 10 years.

                  Another quandary for the industry is system-scale integration. The technology is already here to merge DRAM, logic, and essentially every function of a computer onto a single slice of silicon. When system integration takes place at the silicon level, the industry will certainly experience a paradigm shift as dramatic as the introduction of integrated circuits in the 1960s and microprocessors in the 1970s. System-level integration is a natural evolution. And the consequences would be profound. The challenge would be to adroitly manage such a profound change.

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Basic Biography
Integration Limits
Small Switches
Implications