Expect another massive leap in consumer computing power (and further validation of Moore’s Law) as breakthrough chips hit the market later this year. Hewlett-Packard will also be abiding by Moore’s Law in about a year from now, when it puts nanoengineered chips into its printers. Moore’s Law can also be seen behind the development of memory circuit densitiesof 100 billion bits per square centimeter, though that may take a decade or so to reach your brain computer implant.

On the other hand, the cable TV industry seems oblivious of Moore’s Law. It may be waking up the fact that broadband use and demand is exploding ahead of the industry’s ability to supply it, but it does not seem even to have considered the bandwidth implications of the coming demand for wholly immersive, 3-D, haptic experience – which the new generation of processor and memory chips will make easy. (See, for example, my article about Second Life in H&HN Online.)

400-million-transistor Chips

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Intel and IBM have each announced they will start manufacturing processors using transistors just 45 nanometres (billionths of a metre) wide. The previous state-of-the-art were 65nm transistors. IBM made the breakthrough together with Toshiba, Sony, and AMD, using a new class of silicon substitutes are known as high-k metals.

IBM intends to buld 45nm-class chips in 2008. Intel said it would start in 2007. Intel’s new chips, codenamed Penryn, will contain more than four hundred million transistors and will come in dual-core and quad-core versions.

Nanochips

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Reuters reports that Hewlett-Packard researchers have devised a way to make field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs – chips whose circuitry can be changed through programming) up to eight times denser using nanowires to shrink the density of the chip without shrinking the transistor. This approach also cuts power consumption.and could extend the life of current chipmaking technologies. The chips could be available in HP printers in about a year, HP says.

Record Circuit Density

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Caltech and UCLA scientists have created a memory circuit the size of a human white blood cell and 100 times denser than today’s standard memory circuits, reports AP technology writer Jordan Robertson. The circuit has 160,000 bits of capacity, compared with a 64-bit molecular circuit demonstrated by Hewlett-Packard in 2004, but it is the density of 100 billion bits per square centimeter that is the real breakthrough, because it not only provides a way around a predicted bottleneck that would otherwise throttle Moore’s Law, but even (according to one of the researchers) shows that the technology is advancing faster than Moore’s Law would predict.

A device containing such memory circuits is still at least a decade away from mass production, and is “the sort of device that a semiconductor company like Intel Corp. would contemplate making in 2020.”

Bandwidth Demand Explosion

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Cable operators and equipment suppliers are alarmed by an explosion in bandwidth use by cable subscribers over the last couple of years, writes Alan Breznick of Cable Digital News. In response, “They’re even weighing such previously unthinkable moves as building fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) networks …, just like some of the big phone companies,” he adds.

The explosion is accounted for not only by the surge in high-definition TV (HDTV) programing, which takes three to four times as much bandwidth as standard digital TV channels, but also by “the startling increase” in Internet video use promped in particular by YouTube. A senior Motorola executive, citing CBS’s plans to stream its primetime programs on the Web for no charge a day before they run on TV, warned that the big broadcast networks may soon pose an even greater threat to the cable industry’s video business model than YouTube. “Prepare your networks for the primetime on-demand wave,” he advised cable system owners.

One cable system that serves a major college town reported early signs that younger consumers are opting for Internet video downloads over traditional cable video service. Cable engineers also attributed the swiftly expanding bandwidth needs to the growth of video on demand, digital video recorders, and other time-shifting techniques. “There will always be a need for more upgrades [to cable systems],” said one. “We are always going to need more bandwidth.”