The Digital Evolution
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10/31/2006
3:17 PM
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The Digital Evolution Craig R. Barrett Abstract The following article is an edited transcript based on the plenary address given by Craig R. Barrett, chair of the board of Intel Corp., on April 19, 2006, at the 2006 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting in San Francisco. Since before the industrial revolution, technology has changed lives, opportunities, and economies. Similarly, the digital evolution has touched nearly every aspect of modern life and is reshaping economies around the world. As more and more of the world’s people engage in the digital economy, both competition and opportunities will grow. Competitiveness in the global economy will be determined by how people and nations position themselves in the digital evolution. What lies ahead for us in the next 10 years? What new technologies will alter the technology landscape? What are the opportunities going forward, and how do we prepare? How can materials research and development help us to move forward faster? Keywords: biomedical, education, laser, microelectronics, photoconductivity, semiconducting, Si.
My projection in 1993, here in San Francisco, was that the $77 billion semiconductor industry had a reasonable growth ahead of it. It has grown more than threefold in the last 13 years and should increase this year as well, into the $250 billion range (see Table I). It is a reasonably sized industry and it continues to grow, forming the foundation of most of the rest of the hightech industry. Back in 1993, Pentium processors were just being released, and they had ,10 million transistors. In 1993 I also suggested that Moore’s law would continue to be valid, that we would double transistor counts every 18 months or so. The current transistor count for microprocessors is ,1.7 billion. We are continuing to follow along that trend. It cost less than $1 billion to construct one of our factories in 1993. It costs in excess of $3 billion today. The cost continues to grow in terms of the complexity of the equipment to make these devices. The one area where I missed the mark in 1993 was my prediction of gate oxide thicknesses. Oxide thickness was roughly 80 Å in 1993, and I suggested that by the year 2000 it would decrease to under 50 Å. It actually reached 20 Å in 2000 and is currently at 12 Å, or 3–4 molecules thick. I did well on the overall macroscopics of the business, but I did terribly in my projection of the technical details, and that is why I ended up in management.
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Engine of Change I would like to talk about technology as the engine of change and what it is doing around the world, addressing some of the new fields that are emerging. Some of these fields are very immature today, but 13 years from now I think they will have created whole new industries and new capabilities of their own.
Global Opportunities Let’s look into the future and into the upcoming competitiveness of countries and industries worldwide. I visit about 30 countries each year, and one of the real joys of my current job is trying to be an amba
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