"... by 1975, the number of components per IC ..... will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer"
-Gordon Moore, 1965

Fifty years! It sure sounds like a terribly long time when you talk of IT in this country. It was the start of the personal computing era.

Remember those remote cousins of the present-day PC, which were powered with Intel 8086 & 8088 processors? A far cry from the dual-core powered laptops that we lug around these days. Believe quad-core is round the corner.

Currently PC processors are fabricated at the 90 nm level and below. A decade ago, chips were built at 500 nm level. Fabricators are working with nanotechnology to resolve the 30 nm mark, and beyond. Looks like this trend will postpone the industry meeting the limits of Moore's Law.

Meanwhile the Indian IT industry has seen everything from body-shopping to off-shore services to an exploding IT enabled services sector. The next step is NCPOA (Nerve Center for Process Outsourcing Activities).

But it's the IT user story that will shape the future. The extent and quality of IT usage, both at the corporate as well as the consumer levels, that is. India is still considered a low tech-penetration country, and the 'long tail' is really long if you know what I mean. Technology for the masses will make the next ten years much more exciting.

This mass IT revolution will bring about a fundamental cultural shift in many segements of the Indian populace, thanks to the cost of computing, the Internet, broadband and the convergence of technologies. Today you really don't need to own a computer to qualify as a user. It is a different matter that Indians aren't just crazy about fancy cars, they are equally crazy about gadgets. "I think I'll buy a pink laptop during Christmas". That's not me, that was my neighbor's new girlfriend.

Even girlfriends are new these days. Easy, simply subscribe to the bona-fide dating services. India from what we knew fifty years ago has moved from the 'starving' phase to the 'craving' phase. The Economist, UK believes that India and China will sustain world demand even if the US were to fall into a recession.

But what will drive all this? Back to Gordon Moore. His empirical relationship has many formulations, the most popular one pertaining to the doubling of the number of transistors or ICs (a rough measure of computer processing power) every 18 months. Moore's Law is not about just the density of transistors that can be achieved, but about the density of transistors at which the cost per transistor is the lowest. But never mind that.

Moore's law has been driving semiconductor manufacturers to keep focused on the specified increase in processing power that it was presumed one or more of their competitors would soon be able to attain. In this regard, it has been a self-fulfilling prophecy. Earlier announcements from IBM this year point towards a scenario where its current technique to print circuitry using deep-ultraviolet optical lithography, will allow chipmakers to conform to Moore's Law for the next seven years. There are however newer methods that can achieve smaller circuits, but that may be substantially more expensive at this point.

Therefore dies with 1 billion transistors is not inconceivable. What it really means is that you will have to find ways of not loosing your new gadget powered by a Cray-like vector processor, a few years from now.

When you see the truck-driver on NH-3 take his eyes of the road and punch in some numbers into a wireless gadget to top-up his diesel debit card you know 'IT's a hit'.

All I'm trying to say is that the next ten years are likely to have more stories than the last fifty did, given the rate at which technology is driving things around.

So, come to think of it, fifty years is not a long time really. After all we are living in the twenty-eighth Kali Yuga (of the four Ages) of the seventh manavantra (called Vaivasvata Manavantra) within Sveta Varaha (White Boar) Kalpa. Just for records, a kalpa (out of several) spans billions of years, is divided into 14 periods called manavantras, each of which are made of about seventy cycles of the four yugas. Our current Kali Yuga is supposed to last 432,000 years!

Page(s)   1