In the Beginning was Information

Figure 34: The ant and the microchip.Microchips are the storage elements of present-day computers. Their details arepractically invisible, since structure widths are about one millionth of a metre.What a 30 ton computer of the University of Pennsylvania (USA) could do in 1946,can now be accomplished by a chip less than six square mm in size. Only a fewyears ago chips which could store the text of four typed pages, were regarded asrevolutionary. Today all the telephone numbers of a city like Canberra (Australia)can be stored on one chip. And their speed of operation is so fast that the Biblecould be read 200 times in one second. But there is one thing that all the chips inthe world will never be able to do, namely to copy an ant and all it can do.(Source: “Werkbild Philips”; with the kind permission of “Valvo UnternehmensbereichsBauelemente” of Philips GmbH, Hamburg)Five degrees of integration can be distinguished according to the numberof components per structural unit:SSI (Small Scale Integration) 1 to 10MSI (Medium Scale Integration) 10 to 10 3LSI (Large Scale Integration) 10 3 to 10 4VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) 10 4 to 10 6GSI (Grand Scale Integration) 10 6 and upwardsHigh levels of integration, where between 500 and 150,000 transistors areaccommodated on one silicon chip having an area of between 5 and 30 mm 2 ,led to the development of microprocessors. This technology made it possible190