We bet that 2002 will turn out to contain this recession's bottom. There are many clues pointing to emerging growth markets, while telecom carriers and equipment companies re-capitalize and clear the decks to selectively resume their growth. Historically, end-markets and IC technologies have interacted, pushing and pulling each other to create new miracles. Interconnection just came along for the ride, almost passively. Now it is a vitally needed partner. A snatch of history will provide perspective and show how interconnection's role has changed. 'The Engine of Recovery' No one knew in 1974 that Intel's 8080 microprocessor introduction would be one of the engines of recovery. It was that recession's bottom year, when the infant company was forced to lay off 30 percent of its 2,500 employees. But 8-bit microprocessors, along with dynamic RAMs of during the same time frame, met a growing need for compressed, accessible, distributed computing power. In 15 years, the value of electronic hardware shipments doubled to $400 billion. Interconnection was a relatively unimportant afterthought in those days when PDIPs on doubled-sided PWBs did the job. Still, we must look to developments on today's IC and end-equipment fronts to appreciate both the shape of impending electronic industry recovery and interconnection's larger role. End Equipment and ICs We cannot anticipate all future killer apps, but two references indicate some: First, the August Hot Chips Symposium at Stanford University lived up to its billing. That's where IC and integrated system companies bring out their latest and greatest. Researcher Satya Chillara's [wrhambrecht.com] 100-page report on the new wireless markets especially featured WiFi and WLANs (wireless local area networks). Prior to joining Hambrect, Chillara was director of strategic marketing for ChipPAC. We can report only briefly and very selectively on their content here, but neither leaves any room for gloom. Intel's new 64-bit Xeon and Itanium along with counterparts from IBM, AMD and Sun Microsystems, aimed at GHZ frequencies, will bring technical obsolescence to existing populations of workstations and servers.
Meeting the Interconnection Challenges Just a few pin-out stats along with equipment frequencies indicate the interconnection challenges that must be met to make the new chips possible to use. The Xeon has 50 percent more pins than the Pentium 4's 478 in the same space. Atheros is a start-up chip company that described wireless LAN architectures at Hot Chips. Here's what that company said about wireless connectivity's contribution to improved productivity, so important in this period of margin pressures: "...Wireless LANs are moving from vertical corporate applications (e.g. warehousing, factory, retail) to the general-purpose office-automation space." Chipset Revenues Growing Rapidly Chillara's report, meanwhile, projects WLAN chipset revenues to grow at 60 percent annually to 2005 as transmission frequency moves from 2.4 GHz to 5. Emerging interconnection technologies will meet future challenges. We can only outline them here and will discuss them further in future issues:
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