Barriers to Technology

In 1959 Robert Noyce invented the silicon monolithic integrated circuit. A few years later Gordon Moore decreed that the number of elements contained on a chip would double each year, with the more potent chips costing approximately the same amount year after year. These two events, according to John G. Linvill of Stanford University, marked the. inception of a technology that has since exploded spectacularly.' Linvill was one of a panel of four plenary session speakers at COMPCON 79 Spring in San Francisco February 27. Other speakers at the opening session included consultant Robert M. McClure, William Miller of Stanford University, Arnold Mitchell of SRI International, Myron Tribus of MIT, and consultant Cuthbert Hurd (who chaired the session). Moore's law has fairly accurately predicted the course of the explosion for almost two decades and promises to maintain its predictive accuracy to the mid 1980s. Referring to a recent point on the curve, Linvill cited the production of a 64K-bit CCD bulk memory incorporating 135,000 elements on one chip. Solid state disk. The CCD chip, which has been employed in a storage subsystem by Storage Technology Corporation,2 is a dynamic MOS memory device organized as sixteen 4096-bit serial shift registers (loops). The data in the loops circulates continuously at a clock rate of 1 to 3 MHz. At the latter frequency the average access time is approximately 0.7 millisecond. The chips are organized into a 72 x 24 matrix, providing a word length of 8 bytes plus one error-detection-andcorrection byte. Array capacity is 12 megabytes. With a control unit the storage array emulates the IBM 2305-2 fixedhead disk, attaching to IBM 370 (135 and larger) and 303x CPUs via the block multiplexer channel. It operates with OS, VS1, VM, and MVS operating systems. A fully configured solid state disk (four storage arrays) is equivalent to two 2305-2 facilities. However, STC says that the average access time is about one seventh that of the magnetic disk. In