In the first of three ISSCC keynotes, Haruo Nakatsuka, vice president and chief research officer of Toshiba Corp. (Kawasaki, Japan), will sketch out the image of a home server in 2003 that leverages deep-submicron process technology to blend digital television, 3-D graphics and interactive services. Such a system will need 0.15-micron technology to craft a highly parallel chip that processes 50 million polygons/second and runs at 2 GHz to handle MPEG-4 processing of Internet, telephone and TV data streams.

Pointing the way to such silicon, Toshiba and Sony Computer Entertainment jointly will detail a 128-bit processor with 10 floating point multiply-accumulators and four floating-point divider units built in a 0.18-micron process. The chip, which supports MPEG-2 decoding, is believed to be a central part of a next-generation Sony Playstation that could merge high-end 3-D with DVD-based games.

"It would be a big thing to bring DVD-quality video to a game," said Peter Glaskowsky, senior analyst for 3-D graphics and multimedia at the Microprocessor Report. It's not yet clear how the Toshiba chip would compare with its closest competitor, Hitachi SH-4 used in the CD-ROM-based Sega Dreamcast video console, which processes about 2 million polygons/second, he said.

Fueling the post-PC fervor, Theo Claasen, chief technology officer of Philips Semiconductors (Eindhoven, Netherlands) will argue for a new way to benchmark silicon for a future world in which telephone and video services are readily delivered over both the Internet and cellular systems and DVD is a mass-market product. Signal-processing, measured in millions of operations/W will be the metric for tomorrow's media processors, rather than Mips or megahertz touted in today's data-processing chips.

"Design aiming at optimum speed rather than maximum speed is the ultimate art of digital design," Claasen writes.

In the last of three keynotes, Henry Samueli, chief technology officer of Broadcom Corp. (Irvine, Calif.), will come to grips with an increasingly fragmented landscape of emerging broadband networks from cable modems and Gigabit Ethernet to HDTV and digital subscriber lines.

Samueli's vision of these evolving networks is primarily upbeat, forecasting — among other things — the emergence of a single-chip processor for a high end set-top box using 0.18 micron technology. But the cofounder of Broadcom also sees significant design challenges, chiefly in mixed-signal design for integrated system chips that drive these new networks. As digital CMOS parts push toward lower voltages and power dissipation they will increasingly cramp even the most sophisticated analog designs, he warns.