Peter B. Seel

Digital Universe


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industry sued to shut down Napster and similar services, the genie – and much of the music – were out of the bottle. Without the widespread adoption of the MP3 digital file format and the development of successful peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing technology, music piracy would not have been as simple and easy to accomplish.

      The Social Construction of Technology

      A key theoretical focus in the field of technology and science studies is the Social Construction of Technology (with the obligatory technology acronym of SCOT). Despite the technology-driven patterns in IC manufacturing and music distribution cited earlier, there are problems with the perspective that technology itself determines adoption. SCOT proponents are concerned with adopting a reductionist worldview that a society’s technology determines its cultural values, social structure, or history. Many social scientists and SCOT theorists would argue that the determinism arrow should flow in the opposite direction – that cultural values, social structures, economics, and history determine which technologies are created and adopted in a society.

      The Future of Moore’s Law

       Devices will move beyond silicon. Traditional CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) chips will be augmented with specialized processors that utilize elements such as Germanium and Gallium that are adjacent to Copper and Nickel on the periodic table. Designers are also creating new types of processors that could use evolving technologies such as photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that utilize wavelengths of visible and infrared light – and spintronics (spin transport electronics) chips that function at the subatomic electron level in processing and storing information.

       The development of 3D chips that have multi-layers of processors and storage. Global chip makers are taking advantage of new materials outlined above and new manufacturing processes to stack layers of specialized circuits (much like a very complex club sandwich) to increase processing and storage capabilities, while simultaneously reducing power demands and related heat loads.

       Computer users (and our mobile devices) will use a variety of specialized chips. Intel and other manufacturers are creating new designs with interconnected “chiplets” packaged on a larger device that include distinct multicore CPUs, GPU graphics, imaging, communications, I/O (input/output), and memory functions, often with varying circuit architectures between the chiplets. Some users with specialized processing needs will access devices such as Google’s TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) application-specific chips