Hardware for Machine Intelligence

Perhaps the most defining development for modern microelectronic industry was the introduction of the integrated circuit (IC) more than 30 years ago.   Before the IC era, discrete components could already be manufactured in huge quantities at a low cost, but their massive use was hampered by the tremendous assembly cost related to wiring a large number of the discrete components on a printed circuit board.  The industry that used the new IC technology benefited on the market place by providing better products at lower cost than competitors.

Today semiconductor industry (particularly ASIC companies) stands at a similar roadblock as the companies that produced discrete electronic components in 1960-ties.  It is technologically feasible to mass produce programmable micro controllers at low cost.  However, their massive usage is hampered by the tremendous cost to design systems with a large number of micro controllers, test and maintain them, and write application programs for them.

According to Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors the gap between designers productivity expressed in terms of number of transistors in the designed circuit and the number of transistors that industry can produce grows exponentially.  This gap increases in spite of the widespread use of the CAD tools that support designer’s work.  Applications that employ digital processing technology are concentrated around a single CPU architecture with global communication and control lines and centralized memories.  This focus on single processor applications requires sizable investment in design time and effort to build a multiprocessor system, thus creating a roadblock that does not allow taking full advantage of decreasing processor cost and increasing manufacturing capacity.

Yet, there is one potential application that can surpass all others for the need of massively multiprocessor systems with distributed memories and local communication lines. It is based on identical modular PCBs that can be easily assembled into large systems with massive number of micro-controllers connected through local buses for variety of signal processing applications that may require computing power in excess of pita operations per second. These modular systems will be used for data driven signal processing in which internal configuration of processing components and their interconnection scheme will be a result of machine self-organization. Each micro-controller will modify its operation through interaction with other micro-controllers without explicit modification of its software code. Since all micro-controllers will process their data and choose their interconnection scheme according to the same algorithm, software design effort for such system will be reduced to developing a code for a single micro-controller. Thus, large systems can be assembled and programmed with total design cost limited only by the cost of hardware used.

This application will tremendously benefit ASIC and PLD industries as the demand for their products will multiply many times over today’s market needs.  Industry leaders who can recognize this potential will shape future microelectronic markets by creating demand for this new technology and stimulating growth that match intensity and economic growth of ASIC revolution.