why do computer chips (IC) are on race to be small?
115950
so we don't have to carry around big old a-team phones\ngo to apple .com and check out the Mac Mini\nyou don't have to be a fan to see that the board must be smaller.\nisnt the motherboard a bunch of ICs and if they are smaller...\nBetter yet what if you could cram the entire motherboard and connections on a single silicon wafer instead of having a cctboard\nWhat if You could have a voice dialed pen size cellphone?\n•also power requirements are lower for nanoscale\n•and as for engineering–because there is money in it\nNASA pays $10000.00/453g to put stuff in low-earth orbit\nand perhaps $100000.00/453g to put stuff out at Mars\nNanoscale might mean a lot here.
943579
it really depends on what you are going to do with the micro. if its fairly basic stuff, then you can use 8 bit micro's, otherwise you need to use much faster and powerful ones like the powerQuicc.\n\nI have only dealt with the intel based 8 bit micro's, and in that type there are several manufacturers like atmel, philips, cygnal, etc.. Keil makes a pretty good C compiler for them too.
361869
"Celeron" chips were made with the intention to be "Pentium chips" but they are the ones that fall short of the specifications required to meet the standards of Pentium chips (operating speed, etc.)  In most industries when a manufactured product isn't up to par or "defective" it is discarded.  The Intel company decided that instead of throwing them away, they would make money on them by slapping a cool name on them and put them into computers anyway.\n\nCelerons are substandard and you should never sell yourself and your computer short by letting one into your house.
441296
In certain low volume and high speed circuits, transistors will always have their places. ALthough their are now many more radio chips.\nMIKE
149309
Here's a great article from wikipedia: \nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microprocessor
321436
Actually a man named Ray Kurzweil (something of a big name in these circles) has been writing about this very topic for the past twenty years. Kurzweil is a researcher, inventor, and developer of computer electronics as well as the recipient of a couple presidential awards. Furthermore he is a published author of numerous books and articles regarding technology and human interactions with technology. \n\nOne of the things that he points out is that computers are becoming more and more sophisticated and capable of carrying out more and more computations at faster and faster rates with the passing of each year. That’s not to say that your machine is doing this, but that we’re creating computers that are faster and able to hold more information constantly. As a result we’re rapidly approaching a time when computers are going to be as capable of processing information as the human brain. According to some of his predictions we should be first seeing these advanced machines within the next ten to fifteen years. And with market demands in the US being what they are, the price on these machines will have a tendency to steadily decrease as the technology for making these computers becomes cheaper and more readily available. As a result we as a public may end up owning one of these smarter computers within the next twenty years. \n\nThere are two additional points that he makes though: It will also be likely that research into increasing computer speeds as well as processing, memory storage and retrieval probably wont stop at the point of having a computer that’s as ‘intelligent’ as the human mind. Also, with the aforementioned decline in prices in creating these smarter computers and technology making the production of these machines easier, we may find these computers cropping up in smaller and smaller packages and in more and more things. As a result, we could possibly find ourselves surrounded with this technology quite easily. \n\nI’m not trying to paint a Matrix looking future, but it is possible that we may find ourselves outnumbered by our machines, so we had better have a good idea of what we’re doing when we create them.
1022493
At my college (RPI), it seemed to be the people who wanted to design computer hardware, a type of electrical engineering.  Not really sure if that is true outside of our lovely little bubble away from the 'real world'.
656173
Computer processors require memory for intermediate results, for output storage, etc. And input data is generally found in memory as well. \n\nThings will go faster if these data can be made available instantly on read, or output instantly on write. This is not possible in real world equipment. Some early computers used drums or disks for all sotrage and whenever the CPU needed some data, there was a wait for rotation to bring it under the read heads. And similarly on output. This is a very slow scheme, so faster (but smaller) memory was designed and built. Core memory used lots of little magnetic donuts threaded with wires, semiconductor memory uses transistor structures on ICs. \n\nBut this is slower than ideal as well, at least for adequate amounts of affordable memory. So nearly all CPUs have register memory (very small amounts of very very fast memory) on the chip. There may be as much as 16 (or 32) of these registers, each perhaps 32 bits wide. This is not much memory at all in practice, regardless of how useful. \n\nSo many computers include an intermediate speed memory type. It's called cache memory (from the French) and, if properly done, can speed up processing quite considerably. If poorly done, it can be (literally) a waste of time. Today, cache memory is always made from expensive (and often power hungry)  transistor circuits, which are, in compensation, much faster than ordinary (ie, cheaper) semiconductor memory. \n\nAnd cache memory requires sepcial arrangements. If data is found in the cache, it can be read much more quickly (and generally written mcuh more quickly too) than ordinary RAM, and vastly more quickly than any mechanical mass storage. There must be arrangemetns to keep track of what's in the cache memory so it can be read from there rather than from slower storage, and whether or not changes have been  made to some cache data, so the changed data can be transferred to less expensive, and less heavily used, memory. Cache design, and cache management issues, are an arcane but often very profitable part of computer design. \n\nIn recent years, much cache memory has been built onto chip dies as 'part' of the CPU. This cache is faster than any off chip cache could be, but is quite expensive. This has led to computers with several layers of cache memory. On-chip cache (small amounts, but very fast), level 2 cache (larger affordable amounts, not so fast), level 3 cache (also on the motherboard, much more affordable, and slower still), and so on.
449032
In November, 1971, a company called Intel publicly introduced the world's first single chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004 (U.S. Patent #3,821,715), invented by Intel engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor. After the invention of integrated circuits revolutionized computer design, the only place to go was down -- in size that is. The Intel 4004 chip took the integrated circuit down one step further by placing all the parts that made a computer think (i.e. central processing unit, memory, input and output controls) on one small chip. Programming intelligence into inanimate objects had now become possible.
688938
That's what makes a computer (silicon computer chips)\n\nit's called "silicon" computer chip not because it's silicon but because the semi-conductors (transisters) are planted in silicon (it's just the way they build them now to make them so small)\n\nEvery computer including the one you're on, Xbox, Printers, your cellphone, even calculators, etc... anything that is computerized has that chip in it.\n\nIn your computer you can find it on the mother board, it looks like that...\nhttp://www.enviroliteracy.org/images/page-spec//silicon-chip.jpg\n---it's about the right size too.\n\nThey are used to process the information, it's like your brain. It's the brain of the computer,it tells everything what to do, that's what makes everything work!\n\nWithout them, the computers will be huge (like a city block huge) Just like the ones people first built (with a bunch of wires and crap)\n\nAt the link below, you can see various silicon computer chips...\nhttp://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?p=silicon+computer+chip&sm=Yahoo%21+Search&fr=FP-tab-img-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8\n\n\n\n\nAnd just a little extra for your school project...\nThis is how they make those silicone computer chips...\nI have a friend that works there, he got me one of the unfinished products (it's a shiny disk that's about the size of a waffle) It has like 100 of them on there and they cut them out with a microscopic water stream!!!...\n\nhttp://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/images/3dchip.jpg\n\nhttp://www.intel.com/education/makingchips/index.htm\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCheers!!!\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n.
318348
no.\nPower transistors, ie MOSFETS, will always have thier place in individual circuits. ICs can perform many combined tasks, but don't handle power well , and can't be tailored for every small production circuit. In addition, for repair, it is much easier to replace one blown transistor, than some custom IC. MIKE
1173704
Processors:\n The current trends are leveling off due to restrictions, effectively, on size.  Processor speed is currently experiencing a barrier just over 4GHz due to the immense amount of heat released by a processor running at such high speeds.  Due to the metals used in processors, the power consumption levels in these processors are tremendous, and the fans required to cool them are enormous.  Adding a fan to the case and changing the shape to promote airflow or switching to liquid-cooled systems have been popular solutions to these problems, but a 4GHz processor in a mini-PC is just begging to overheat.  Therefore AMD and Intel chose the only obvious cost-effective solution:  the switch to dual cores.  While running two cores doesn't double the computing speed, it does significantly increase the computing power of the processor.  However, only select software will greatly benefit from this technology.  Software developed for single-core processors only sees a smaller boost in speed because it relies on the system to distribute work.  Another trick to increase speed is to increase the Level 2 cache size.  Pentium has upped their L2 cache sizes to 2MB while AMD still runs 512KB L2's.  An increase in level 1 cache memory would be more effective but much less cost-efficient.  Today's processors run at about 1.6 volts.  Technology will have to change to permit faster processors to fit in the same space.\n\nPermanent memory:\n It's tough to tell because money is being shifted toward new-technology reasearch as of late, as opposed to merely making the same old technology smaller.  On the subject of trends in hard drive space though, in 1994, 1 GB was a lot.  In 98, 6GB was a lot.  In 2002, 30GB was a lot.  In 2006, 300GB is a lot.  You do the math.  By 2010, assuming we're using the same technology, I'd say hard drives will come standard 4-6TB but that's pushing physical limits.\n\nTemporary memory:\n RAM is on the same exponential curve as permanent memory.  In 96, 32MB of RAM was a lot.  Now, 8 years later, computers are shipping out with 2GB standard.  By 2010, I'd say 40-50GB will not be unheard of.\n\nOh, you asked about next year, not 2010.  I'd say modest growth, with standard hard disks pushing 500GB but with a lot of new prototypes in development, and RAM pushing 4GB.  Processor clock speed is tough to guess, because it's hard to say what new technology will emerge, and if they will push clock speed.  However it's safe to say that the standard CPU will be predictably faster next year.
471297
It has the obvious advantage of being much faster.  But also, it will help that Intel develops new and improved hardware at a much faster rate and at considerably less cost than Motorola ever did, thereby giving you greater performance at a lower cost.  Possible disadvantages could be that BIOS chips that operate with the Intel processor will still not be updated, but we can hope that Macintosh will continue to maintain its high standards of hardware.\nBecause Intel is using x86 type processors it's possible that we will see generations of Macintoshes running Windows instead of Mac OSX. On the other hand, it may give Mac OSX greater popularity, now that some of the first MacBooks can dual boot into Windows XP, because it will give users a bit more opportunity to get over the learning curve of switching operating systems.  We will just have to wait and see.
311122
Here is a good article on what goes into making a chip and this goes for most memory as well.\n\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
438803
I've actually pondered this myself when taking digital circuit courses... The solution , i THINK, involves having not just one large memory unit , but instead, breaking the memory into 4 or 8 or 16 or more parts and using some kind of chip-select mechanism (using a multiplexer)
378747
It is a single chip that has dual processor cores.  I have it on my laptop and it's great! Software today can't really take advantage of it, but future software will.  Currently the biggest benefit comes while multitasking.
860859
Flip flops are circuits that store a single bit of information in a computer CPU.\n\nA race condition occurs when a signal is sent to many different circuit elements (registers, gates, or whatever).  The time it takes the signal to reach each of those will differ depending on how far the elements are from each other and how many other circuit components it needs to go across (e.g. booster or gates) and the overall capacitance of the circuit.  When designing the circuit you need to take care that you calculate the delays and account for them as part of your design.  That means you need to adjust the paths so that the signal reaches each of its destinations prior to the next clock cycle.