2.1 The onward march of third information revolution in the first  (Page 4/14)

In bygone ages , you could never outgrow the handset of your youth. Telephones were tethered to the wall, trunk calls would remain a costly affair. But with the advent of Internet Telephony, cell phones and competition between service providers, all that has changed beyond recognition as the above time line shows. Still switch over to VoIP will not be happen overnight. 4G will coexist with 3G and 2G for much of the next decade. “But as communications adopt an all-IP architecture, it will get easier to overlay voice on top of other technologies. Digitized voice is finding its way into dozens of applications, including social networking, online gaming, videoconferencing, even advertising.”

Technology 4_LED LIGHTING

LED was first introduced in 1970 as red LED and its application was confined to as power indicators. But as R&D progressed in the field, its efficiency , brightness and affordability improved. Today it is 20 times as bright and 90% cheaper per Watt. This improvement is known as Haitz’s law. Later on yellow and blue LEDs were introduced and here also improvement took place according to Haitz’s law.

Table 1. Progress in LEDs since 1970

As shown in Figure 1, the first generation white LED was as shown but it had serious problems of light emission. Only a small portion of radiation was coming out of the front portion. To overcome this problem processing was changed.and second generation LED

was commercialized. White LEDs were a commercial success. A 7W LED could deliver as much illumination as 40W incandescent lamp. A good quality LED would cost $55 but its investment would be recovered in 5 years. The manufacturing cost is going down as the substrate size is increasing and as yield is improving. The substrate size has increased from 2” to 3” to 4” and now 6”. The efficiency of energy conversion is being improved also. Right now 100 lumens of illumination per Watt has been achieved. By 2015, 200 lumens per Watt is expected to be achieved. This technology is destined to replace all the existing illumination technology.

Technolgy 5_MULTICORE CPUs

By scaling the transistors, computation speed could be improved . But this led to the problem of heating hence instruction level parallelism was introduced. This was known as “superscalar architecture”. Here quadrupling the physical resources led to linear increase in computational performance. At this point dual core processor was introduced. This achieved parallel processing without delay inducing complexity. For thermal power dissipation management, most of the processor giants such as Intel, AMD and IBM went for multicore processors. In 2005 Intel marketed first dual-core component, Pentium D. Here there were two single-core processors tied together by front-side bus in the same package.