Moore's Law Ekes By

Two technological breakthroughs hold special promise for wireless. However, don't be put off by the fact that they won't be commercially available for several years. Ultimately, both will revolutionize our world and continue to support the oft-lauded Moore's Law.

The first breakthrough is Intel's TeraHertz transistor. The company plans to produce chips with 25 times the number of transistors on today's microprocessors at 10 times the speed but without any increase in power consumption. Hold on to your hat, Jack.

The new transistor uses chemical compounds and a new design to shrink it so that 1 billion fit on a chip. This compares to 42 million transistors on today's Pentium 4.

Intel plans to begin using the transistor in its chips around 2005. After that, many fear that Moore's Law will hit a wall. But wait, scientists anticipate that atom-sized materials could be the next step.

And that leads to the second breakthrough. Last month, two Bell Labs scientists unveiled a transistor with a single-molecule channel length. Successful development of the unconventional semiconductor material provides the next step in the evolution of the transistor. These transistors are so small that about 10 million of them will fit on the head of a pin. Bell Labs' single-molecule transistor is less than a tenth the size of any previously made transistor.

Now that Moore's Law is preserved for the moment, what do these new transistor developments mean to wireless?Bottom line: faster, smaller, cooler.

The wireless industry has successfully battled size issues and brought today's voice products down to acceptable portability sizes thanks to chip improvements. However, 2.5G and 3G developments threaten to reverse that utopian size configuration by adding multiple modes and data elements.

Assuming no reduction in chips, these newer wireless handsets would revert to 1990s sizes with huge power consumption needs. Anybody remember the heat problems that NovAtel experienced with its early lines of phones? Without these chip developments, you could expect more vendors to crumble under the same weights and power requirements.

So after the new transistor becomes commercially available, what can you expect? A number of European and Korean vendors prophesy wearable wireless gadgets that give users access to people and technologies by simply tapping their shirtsleeves or reading eyeglass screens. Perhaps that's a little too avant-garde for mass adoption. However, commercial availability assures one thing — smaller chip size with greater power will increase functionality and enable applications beyond the scope of today's devices. This assures that new wireless data devices will be able to rival the ideal size achieved by today's voice devices.

Smarter home appliances also play a part in this wireless Internet promise.

However, who among us longs for a larger refrigerator or washing machine whose footprint is more consumed by circuitry. These new chip developments will allow these and other household appliances to become more intelligent — telling you it's time to buy milk — without sacrificing space. Homebuilders will no doubt be relieved.

The same promise extends to servers and other processors of wireless data and information. This will keep business and the economy humming along at even greater speeds. These chips might even take us to the era in which machines comprehend and rationalize. And from there, who knows? Maybe spiritual processing.

Nevertheless, it's striking that a development so small could be so potentially huge. In a Moorsian twist on the familiar theorem, size does matter.

How long can Moore's Law continue to be valid? Write to rwickham@primediabusiness.com.