What is it?
Micro Electronics is at the heart the technological revolution. It is an enabler for the software revolution that we are now
in. In the beginning, electronic systems were constructed from discrete devices with wires connecting them together. Then came the printed wiring board (PWB) that reduced the labour
requirement tremendously and enabled automation of the device placement and the soldering (fixing the devices onto the PWB so they make good ‘permanent’ electrical contacts, using an alloy of tin
and lead). Once semiconductors had been invented and developed into doped silicon devices, the door was open for multiple devices to be made on the surface of a single piece of silicon - to
make a chip. That was the beginning of micro electronics, and generation after generation of chip has come and gone, including the first microprocessor. In
memory chips, the rule of thumb for a long period was a quadrupling of memory capability on a chip every 18 months. With that sort of growth it doesn’t take long before chips become incredible
complex as they are now with massive memory chips of 64 Mbytes (half a billion bits!) or more available quite cheaply; and microprocessors with tens of millions of
transistors working at clock speeds of a billion cycles per second or more.
Now that the physical limits of miniaturisation are being approached and quantum effects are coming in (that
can allow electrons to have a significant probability of being at the other side of an insulator, new approaches are needed to maintain the momentum in increased capabilities of microelectronic devices.
Maybe building in 3 dimensions, maybe exploiting quantum effects rather than fighting them or maybe even the quantum effects of simultaneous multiple states that are so tantalising hinted at by the
quantum computing researchers.
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