The implication is that increases in usefulness will require increasingly more powerful technology. The speaker pointed to successes they have had in integrating up to 8 ethernet transceivers per chip, and the new technical demands that higher capacity ethernet standards require. Implementing such improvements pose real challenges to analog IC block design, IC process technology, shrinking minimum features. Current IC design tools need help to handle 100 million transistor systems. It is worth noting that these chips operate at room temperature, though some require severe cooling to do so.
Several manufacturers use copper wiring on chip, and several more are planning to.
One of the new MMX-x86 processors includes an instruction set that allows 30 frame per second MPEG2 encoding. SiGe BJTs use a mixture of silicon and germanium in the base to The talk summarized developments in SiGe BJT design over the last decade, explaining how the current technology overcomes some of the shortcomings of Silicon-only BJTs. They have tested production devices on wafer at 20 GHz, and packaged devices at above 1 GHz. One clever advance was to use upper metal layers to decrease the loss on the transmission lines. The design also required careful and independent tuning of transmission lines connecting gate electrodes and drain electrodes in order to produce gain in phase.