From: tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)
Date: Thu, 30 May 1996 16:57:37 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: A billion transistors on a chip
Message-ID: <add25a2b21021004f52d@[205.199.118.202]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 9:01 PM 5/29/96, jim bell wrote:
>At 03:46 PM 5/29/96 GMT, John Young wrote:
>>   5-29-96. FiTi:
>>
>>   Chips Galore [Editorial]
>>   Texas Instruments' claim to have developed a technology
>>   capable of inscribing 125m transistors, or computing
>>   elements, on a thumbnail-sized slice of silicon is
>>   remarkable chiefly because the technique is commonplace.
>
>Having been following the progress of IC technology for over 20 years, I can
>recall when 1 million transistors/chip was the furthest-out prediction
>"they" were willing to make.

I was one of "them" as early as 1974, more than 22 years ago, when the
leading chips of the day contained about 15,000 transistors.

And I recall _many_ forecasts about the number of transistors which would
be likely to be on a chip.

Gordon Moore, a guy I had many dealings with in my years at Intel, had his
charts and it was pretty clear where things were going. At least 20 years
ago it was apparent that lithography trends would make a million
transistors on a chip a reality by 1990, if not earlier.

I recall Jim Meindl of Stanford, whose class I spoke to in the late 70s,
was predicting a _billion_ transistors on a chip by the year 2000. I and my
colleagues at Intel felt he was on target, and this was almost 20 years
ago. And it appears he is on target, give or take a trivial factor of two
or so.

Final Note: I watched Jerry Junkins of T.I. make his "TImeline" (not to be
confused with "TIMline") chip announcement yesterday, on CNN and CNBC. He
died this morning of a heart attack, on a business trip to Germany. Texas
Instruments was a rival of Intel's, but Junkins was undoubtetly a great
business leader. He will be missed.

--Tim May

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