Single Chip Computers

Abstract

The history of integrated circuits shows exponential increases in the number of transistors on a chip and in the number of operations a single chip computer, or microprocessor, can execute in a second. In three years the state of the art will be represented by million transistor chips performing several million operations per second over 32 bit data and address paths, the same as a mainframe computer. These trends are projected to continue for at least the rest of tbe century until physical limits in tbe fabrication technology and in the fundamental physics of computation are reached. Microprocessor based computers will probably find their most significant use in the latter part of the 20th century as expert systems; these emulate the thinking of a human expert in some well-defined realm of knowledge, such as medicine, geological prospecting, or electrical engineering.