When logic circuits consisted of transistors, resistors and diodes, they were very large and fragile. Worse yet they were expensive. The one gigabyte memory key that you wear with your car keys would have consisted of one million 6”x 8”x 2” core memory modules which each held 1024 words of 36 bits and weighed over a pound. They were a little slow by our standards, one microsecond access. They cost $18,000.00 each. Altogether the weight would be one million pounds and cost $18 billion. It is not necessary to address the power requirements in this discussion.
Why can they sell you the memory key for under $100.00? The real answer is in assembly time. Also people are not good at assembling really tiny things, they don’t require a million pounds of mass anyway. The billion bytes of memory are on the top thousandth of an inch of a quarter of a square inch of silicon. The rest of the size is because you’re human, and people are not good at assembling really tiny things. If they made it much smaller, you’d break it or lose it.
Where did the assembly time go? That was accomplished by photo processing. We take a big slice of silicon, and we make many circuits at once on it and dice it into many separate parts. A one-foot diameter wafer can make over 10,000 of the parts for your memory key. They process hundreds of wafers in each batch, so the cost of the real part of your key is very little.
At first, the only things that we could integrate were logic gates. There had to be a lot of parts around the logic to make it work. People slowly learned how to make every electronic circuit on one surface. But circuits require power. “A pin for power and one for ground, that didn’t take much thought, now package it and sell some.”
So we can put some very neat things in small boxes. What do we do with them? Well, you put a lot of them on a printed circuit board and attach a battery. It works every time. What if the battery was in the box? Well, we’re building bigger boxes now; we would just make two or three boxes to be a laptop. If we planned them right, they would stack. “What about the floppy? … They went out of style months ago where have you been, unemployed?”
“So what’s the point?” The assembly time to put hundreds of capacitors and regulators around dozens of complex devices will drop to very little. A cellular phone will use one chip with a gas tank on its back and a display. “What about the keyboard?” That’s what will be a MEMS area soon. So they’ll get smaller? “Only if you can still find a way to use it, but lots cheaper!” What about the battery? “It’s in there.”
“So what will the effect be from a general point of view?” Well there is a billion-piece market for cell phones. “If there are batteries in them, part of the money goes for the battery.” If there is no battery and a smaller cost for assembly, then the chip is worth more. “When everyone can make fuel cells on a logic wafer, the price goes down.” When will that be? “When the patents expire.”