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.