A Few Suggestions

I wasn't entirely forthcoming in my editorial last month (see MPR 12/30/02-02, "Toward a Brighter Tomorrow") when I declined to name specific new ways for semiconductors to add value to our lives in areas such as clothing, food, housing, and furniture. In fact, I can point to a few applications that could double the total world market for semiconductors—from tiny sensors to complex microprocessors.

Some of the smallest chips we'll ever use may have the highest-volume opportunity. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags could eventually replace bar codes on all kinds of consumer goods. RFID tags can be read at a distance, eliminating much of the labor associated with inventory taking and with both wholesale and retail transactions. They can also be overprinted with packaging graphics; don't underestimate the value of improved aesthetics.

Even smaller chips could eventually be manufactured by the trillions each year: so-called "smart dust." Chips just 5–10 microns on a side would be individually invisible to the naked eye.

Smart dust could be mixed into building materials, such as concrete and plywood, to report temperatures, pressures, and mechanical stresses during construction, ensuring that homes and office buildings meet all structural codes. These tiny chips could also be vulcanized into tires to detect improper inflation and give advance warning of tire failures. Smart dust could even be ingested or inhaled to monitor our health.

I'm not speaking here of nanotechnology, the future dream of machines built from individual atoms. This is current technology, devices we can start building today. A chip 10 microns square, made with 0.13-micron technology, can have hundreds of integrated components. With the 32nm technology scheduled to arrive by 2009, the component count will be in the thousands. That's more than sufficient to implement a fairly complicated sensor with local storage and processing, along with a radio transceiver—albeit one that would have to operate at a frequency of about 2THz, midway between the common definitions of radio and light.

Smart houses have been "just a few years away" for almost my whole life. It's easy to imagine the potential benefits of computer-controlled housing. If my house knows where I am and whether I'm cold or hungry, it can turn off the lights in other rooms, adjust the furnace, and even begin preparing a preselected meal. The old notion of the smart house was based on the concept of a central computer running all the systems, but the smarter approach is distributed computing—with intelligent appliances throughout the house and no single point of failure. With every new generation of microprocessor-controlled ovens, thermostats, and digital video recorders, we get closer to that future.

Our furniture can be smart, too. I don't want my couch to beep at me just because I've opened a second bag of potato chips in one day, but I might not mind being awakened if I fall asleep in front of the TV. I would certainly pay extra for a bed that could detect a stroke or heart attack and call for medical assistance.

Smart clothing is already here. Indeed, it's old news. The first smart clothing was created by students at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the 1970s to facilitate cheating at roulette. Shoes with MOS Technology 6502 microprocessors, radios, and vibrating elements used a nonlinear dynamics simulation to give the players an advantage over the house.

Today, some 25 years later, most smart clothing still isn't that smart, mostly because the clothing industry is smart enough to let the consumer-electronics industry provide the smarts. The Scott eVest incorporates no microprocessors, but it can carry several electronic gizmos connected via internal wiring channels. The Burton Amp jacket, co-designed with Apple Computer, has buttons to control Apple's iPod music player sewn directly into its sleeve—and it's rugged enough for use by snowboarders.

On a more serious note, the VivoMetrics LifeShirt may help save the lives of people with heart and lung problems. This machine-washable T-shirt incorporates sensors that monitor dozens of cardiopulmonary parameters. The collected data are stored in a Handspring Visor PDA for later evaluation, providing valuable insight into a patient's health during her/his daily activities.

I don't want to overlook the many new applications for semiconductors in computer systems. Despite the growth of the Internet and wireless networking, the world is full of computerized devices that don't talk to each other. Most offices include a digital private branch exchange (PBX) system, and many PBXs today are built around commodity personal computer technology—yet PBXs are almost never connected to the company's computer network.

There's no need to maintain what amounts to two independent data networks in each office building. The smarter approach would be to fold the functions of the local-area network (LAN) into the PBX system, using voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) technology for traditional telephone functions. The phone then becomes the office PC's network adapter. Costs are reduced by eliminating redundant cabling, and productivity is improved by integrating email and voice mail. Cisco and other companies already offer such systems, but they've been slow to catch on.

Perhaps they need to deliver even more value. An integrated voice and data network can be extended to support videoconferencing that works as easily as making an interoffice phone call. Once you have videoconferencing, why not video messaging and document sharing? If these features come with the flexibility of the PC and the reliability of the phone system (not vice versa), they may attract a more sizable market.

I actually like the idea of allowing these LAN-attached telephones to drive the computer monitor directly. This might be the best way to make videoconferencing as reliable as phone calls are today. Monitors would have to become slightly smarter to handle multiple simultaneous inputs, but that should be easy enough.

Monitors need to be smarter for other reasons. Only a tiny fraction of all computer monitors today are ever calibrated to ensure they are displaying the correct colors. Even the best of these calibrated monitors is unable to display more than about half of the colors the eye can see, and changing ambient light conditions—or even the user's clothing—can alter appearances despite whatever calibration may be in place. Instead, monitors make do with approximations based on simple predictive models.

Digital photography is becoming commonplace, and photo-quality printers are widely available. Random variations from screen to paper should be considered unacceptable, but most computer users take them for granted. Users know that printed photographs look different than they did on the monitor, but they don't know why.

The truth is that it takes a lot of processing power in the computer, and more in the monitor, and still more in the printer, to correct all these problems. Only recently has it become practical to close the loop with sensors and signal processing to guarantee that what you get is exactly what you want.

Audio devices also use an open-loop control scheme. Audio CDs are encoded with the exact music we want to hear, but no stereo system is designed to make sure we hear it. CD players create a reasonably correct analog signal from the digital bitstream, but that's the end of the feedback loop. Amplifiers drive speakers with unknown characteristics; cables and physical acoustics add even more uncertainty.

The answer is to deliver the digital bitstream to speakers that amplify the signal and monitor the result, using wireless microphones at the intended listening position. The commercial success of the Bose Wave radio, which offers minor improvements over the quality of previous products, proves there's a big market for good sound at a good price. All-digital sound systems will require a lot of signal processing, but the going cost of 1GFLOPS is around $20 today and falling rapidly.

I'm running out of room here, and I haven't even gotten around to explaining the huge markets waiting for portable video devices and secure digital two-way radio systems for police, fire, and air-traffic control. Also, I have also discovered a truly marvelous new computer system architecture that this editorial is too small to contain...