Jack Kilby wasn't at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose a couple of weeks ago, but I thought of him there. Kilby gave an interview to Craig Matsumoto and me a couple of months back in Dallas. A giant of a man both in physical stature and in his contributions to the industry (he is co-inventor of the electronic calculator as well as the integrated circuit), Kilby tends to fool people. He speaks slowly, with deliberation, which stems more from his Kansas roots (his engineering father helped install the power grid in that rural state) than from his adopted home of Texas. Six feet in height, with thick glasses and a pronounced squint, Kilby is probably one of the sharpest Old Timers around. Not many people can discourse about the days when the price of a transistor was $10, and how people worried that the sky was falling when competition caused the transistor price to drop to a single dollar.
Toward the end of our interview, Gail Chandler, a Texas Instruments public-relations staffer, pulled out a piece of paper and gingerly asked Kilby if he would mind answering a few questions that had been e-mailed in from a Brazilian journalist. With less-than-perfect English, the Brazilian posed a question to Kilby: Will chips be used in the soil, in doors, in almost everything and everywhere?
We laughed. I went back to the Dallas Hilton, took out the "key" from my wallet and slid it in the slot. Isn't there a microprocessor in just about every hotel door now? When was the last time the front-desk clerk handed you a metal key?
And how about the soil? My lawn-care book tells me to scrape some soil into a jar and send it off to my local soil-testing service. Why can't I just push a stick into the ground and have the chip tell me whether I need to add lime, or what the nitrogen content of the fertilizer should be? And how about all those calves up in Kansas? How many of them have chips implanted inside, chips that tell the farmer their daily rate of gain?
We often write about Intel and its competitors. Kilby himself was intensely interested in the fact that National Semiconductor had just started making the Cyrix processors at its new fab in Maine.
But much of the growth in silicon over the next decade will be in the 4-bitters, the 8-bitters and other humble chips. Sure, the dollars spent on DSPs will increase quickly, and the computer market will thrive (particularly if we have PCs "embedded" in our hotel desks and folding down like food trays in our airplane seats). And that is why the Embedded Systems Conference was such as upbeat event, a leading indicator of a rebound in the silicon industry.
