The Tip of the Iceberg

Moore's Law, that the number of transistors that can be integrated onto a single chip doubles about every 18 months, has played such an important role in the evolution of the electronics industry that it has now become well known even outside the industry. Less well known are other trends where the pace of change is even faster. Connectivity bandwidth, for example, doubles every 12 months, while the amount of embedded software shipped with new products doubles every ten months.

To these we can add the more general market trend of "consumerization" i.e. increasingly unpredictable market cycles, continuous upgrading of models to gain short-lived price/performance advantages, increasing pressures on profit margins, the growing role of brand recognition and distribution channels ... and so on. Even the acronyms we use are coming under pressure: VoIP, for example, means Voice over Internet Protocol today but tomorrow it will mean Video over Internet Protocol.

Although Moore's Law remains the most significant and visible driving force in our industry, it is just the tip of the iceberg and staying at the forefront of technology is just one of many different challenges for today's chip manufacturers.

The nature of some of these challenges were examined at ST's recent "Big Picture" event that is the lead article in this issue of Challenge. Other articles in this issue reflect one of the most important of these challenges, which is the need for chip manufacturers to be work with a wide variety of partners to enable the exploding technological capabilities to be applied in highly dynamic markets. These include partnerships with specialist companies such as Lara Networks (for IP packet processing engines) and Netergy Networks (for VoIP), as well as research projects such as ACTIVE that bring together multiple, complementary skills.