Unit 9 electronics: toward miniaturization

Lead-in

• What are the reasons for electronics to change so rapidly?

• What do you think of miniaturization of electronic components? Why is it so important?

• What electronic components will continue to miniaturize in the future?

1. Practise pronunciation of the following words and underline the stressed syllable. Translate the words into Ukrainian.

Toward miniaturization, newly, Norwegian, grams, breakthrough, superseded, originating, lead, gene, undertaken, architecture, acronym, foreseeable, reduction, gallium arsenide, parallel, overall.

2. Match the following words and word combinations with their translation.

	surface mount technology (SMT)	технологія монтажу на поверхню
	shrink	зменшуватися
	breakthrough	прорив
	to live sth up to	виправдовувати сподівання
	supersede	витісняти; займати місце
	quadraphonic sound	квадрофонічний звук
	bubble memory	пам’ять на циліндричних запам’ятовуючих присторях
	consumed	споживаний
	undertake	брати на себе
	electronic ink	електронні чорнила
	outperform	робити краще, ніж хтось
	RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processors	процесор з скороченим набором команд
	foreseeable	передбачуваний
	to bring sth about	здійснювати
	gallium arsenide	арсенід галію
	densely	густо, щільно
	sole	єдиний
	as well	крім того, на додаток
	hand-in-hand	разом

3. Read the text and write key phrases that summarise each paragraph. Electronics: towards miniaturization

І

Electronics changes rapidly and the trend toward miniaturization has continued too. The range of surface mount technology (SMT) components expands daily. Mobile phones and video cameras shrink steadily in size. The newly released FXI Cotton Candy is claimed to be the smallest PC in the world. Designed by Norwegian company FXI Technologies and is about the size of a normal USB stick, 8cm x 2.5cm and 21 grams. It performs most of the functions of its larger “colleagues”, including running the Windows and Linux operating systems.

But, as always, some developments that were heralded as major break-throughs, subsequently fail to live up to expectation or are superseded by later developments. Quadraphonic sound and bubble memories are two examples.

Another prediction, originating decades ago, has never been fulfilled. This was the belief that the advent of computing on a wide scale would lead to the “paperless office”. Observation of the desks of most present-day offices shows that, far from reducing the amount of paper consumed, computing has increased the demand for paper. “Hard copy” has a nice safe feel to it and a development that could help to bring it about has been made. Electronic ink has recently been demonstrated as a practical proposition.

Electronic ink and most other innovations in electronics are related to increasing computing power. The Blue Gene programme undertaken by IBM is aimed at producing a new computer architecture that will comfortably outperform all of today's machines. The new architecture is called SMASH, which is an acronym for Simple, MAny and Self-Healing. The system is simple because it is based on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing (technology)) processors. These processors have only 57 instructions compared with several hundreds in a Pentium.

ІІ

Such are the foreseeable developments in computer architecture, but what of future developments in electronics itself? Here the most likely forecast can be summed up in three words: smaller, faster, and smarter. The more significant aspect of size reduction is the miniaturization of the components themselves, to which we have already referred. Much research is aimed at making transistors smaller than ever, with the aim of packing more and more of them on the chip. New semiconductors, such as those based on gallium arsenide, promise to give us smaller, more densely packed transistors, leading to a new phase of larger-scale integration. Small size is not the sole aim of these researches; a densely-packed circuit has shorter connections between its components, which means that signals pass from one to the other more quickly.

Operating speed can be significantly increased. A parallel effect arises because smaller transistors have lower capacitance and switch states more rapidly and the power consumption is reduced as well. All of this encourages the use of microprocessors and other complex ICs in electronic systems, leading to an overall increase in “smartness” of all our electronic equipment. This trend is set to continue, and smaller-sized circuits also will be both faster and smarter and these three qualities go hand-in-hand.