The Internet Age has added some new twists. Today, the law that says the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months has to share the driver's seat with Gene's Law on energy consumption. Gene Frantz is the TI Senior Fellow who postulated that the energy requirements to run a chip will drop by a factor of 1.6 every year. And power consumption is a tiny sliver of what it once was. By 2010, we anticipate DSPs that can process 3 trillion instructions per second with a chip about the size of a thumbtack.
Functional integration is another new twist.
This means taking analog and digital functions that separate chips previously handled, and combining them onto a single chip. The first generation of wireless in the US started in the mid-1980s, and it was strictly an analog proposition. It had more than 1,000 separate electronic components. TI's engineers got involved in the early 1990s to help develop second-generation digital phones. We worked with companies such as Nokia to develop handsets that grew increasingly smaller in size, yet offered better sound quality and lasted longer on a single battery charge.