Moore's Law Meets Its Match

by R.R. Tummala IEEE Spectrum, June 2006 Remember when combining a camera with a cellphone seemed daring? Or adding a cellphone to a PDA? Such technical tricks relied on Moore’s Law, which holds that the number of transistors on an IC doubles every 18 months. In the computing world, having more transistors on a chip means more speed and possibly more functions. But in many cases, those Moore’s Law ICs deal with only 10 percent of the system. The other 90 percent is still there, showing up as an array of bulky discrete passive components -- such as resistors, capacitors, inductors, antennas, filters, and switches -- interconnected over a printed-circuit board or two. Real miniaturization requires something more, and we have it in the system-on-package approach we’re pursuing at the Microsystems Packaging Research Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta. Read more