Sight to the blind via silicon?
Published: 13 Feb 2004 15:40 GMT
Chip designers will converge on San Francisco next week to discuss their ideas about new types of flash memory and about bringing sight to the blind.
The International Solid State Circuits Conference, the granddaddy of semiconductor research conferences, and the semiannual Intel Developer Forum will both take place during the week of 15 February in roughly the same location.
While topics and attendance at the two events will overlap, the two conferences are somewhat distinct. At ISSCC, researchers from large companies and academia present research papers on cutting-edge chip design concepts spanning the gamut of the semiconductor industry -- communications, microprocessors, memory, nonvolatile memory and wireless systems to name a few -- that may come to the market during the next five years.
Here's information on some of the notable papers at the conference, which runs from 15 February to 19 February:
IBM, meanwhile, will provide details on a Power 5 server chip that runs at speeds higher than 1.5GHz, and on a 2.5GHz PowerPC processor, a faster version of the chip currently found in machines from Apple Computer. Intel and Sun Microsystems will also discuss processor changes coming in the next few years.
Many of the conference papers -- such as "CMOS Image Sensors Using Floating Diffusion Burled Photodiode" from Sony -- sound like high-quality gobbledygook to the layperson. Still, the 51-year-old conference has been the launchpad for many computing breakthroughs. Papers that first described digital signal processors, or DSP (Bell Labs, 1980), RISC chips (UC Berkeley, Stanford, 1984), 100MHz processors (Intel, 1991) and 1GHz processors (Digital; Intel, 2000) were first presented at the conference.
Pass the chips
By contrast, the Intel Developer Forum, which takes place from 17 February to 19 February, largely revolves around chips and other technology coming out of Intel and its allies and geared toward changing PCs, networking equipment, handhelds and servers.
Many announcements -- such as the prototype notebooks and desktops that are unveiled at the conference -- concern technology that starts to appear on shelves within a year or two.
Intel, however, also discusses inventions, such as sensor networks and carbon nanotubes, that might not appear for a decade. This year, for instance, chief technology officer Pat Gelsinger will outline his vision for the "tera era" of computing, where computers with chips running in the terahertz range will search through terabytes of data for audio or video files. Search engines can find these now, but through text subtitles.
"Voice increases the complexity to an n squared," Gelsinger said of the future world of Internet searches.
Among the highlights, the company is expected to show off for the first time a Pentium-type chip that can handle 32-bit and 64-bit software, similar to the Opteron from rival Advanced Micro Devices, which will be holding briefings at hotels in the area at the same time.
Chief executive Craig Barrett, who is scheduled to deliver the keynote on Tuesday, is also expected to discuss some of Intel's efforts in robotics, according to sources. Carnegie Mellon University professor Red Whittaker, who is managing the university's entrant for the DARPA Grand Challenge robotic-vehicle race, will make a presentation at the conference. Intel is a sponsor of the team.
Other highlights:
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