Product Introductions and Price Measures for Microprocessor Chips in the 1990s

The semiconductor industry is credited with one of the fastest rates of product innovation and technical change within manufacturing, as chipmakers generate wave after wave of ever more powerful chips at prices not much higher than those of existing chips. This industry has undoubtedly been an important driver of productivity growth as advances in semiconductors paved the way for co-invention in downstream industries that, taken together, provide firms with more efficient ways to do business and the ability to provide new goods and services that ultimately increase consumer welfare. In the mid-1990s, measured productivity growth for the industry shows a pickup that coincided with an economy-wide pickup in labor productivity growth. The acceleration in the semiconductor market stems from an increase in the growth of real output that was, in turn, generated by what Jorgenson (2001) calls an “inflection point” in price indexes for the semiconductor industry. Within semiconductors, microprocessors (MPUs) produced by Intel were the primary contributor to both the trend and inflection point in this price index. This paper explores movements in the price index for MPU chips over the 1990s to better understand sources of the pickup in measured productivity growth. Three major developments in MPU markets that roughly coincided with the measured increase in productivity are reviewed: 1) the introduction of more sophisticated lithography equipment that could have allowed Intel to increase its rate of product innovation; 2) an increase in competitive pressure from AMD; and 3) a pickup in the rate of product introductions at Intel. A stylized framework for decision-making at Intel is developed and used to show that the increase in the rate of product introductions at Intel could have been a profit-maximizing response to increased competition from AMD. The model is then used to explore the implications for price measurement.Semiconductor industry, price measurement, product cycles

CMOS design of cellular APAPs and FPAPAPs: an overview

CNN-based analog visual microprocessors have similarities with the so-called Single Instruction Multiple Data systems, although they work directly on analog signal representations obtained through embedded optical sensors and hence do not need a frontend sensory plane or analog-to-digital converters. The architecture of these visual microprocessors is illustrated in the paper through two prototype chips, namely: ACE4K and ACE16K. In both cases, as in other related chips the architecture includes a core array of interconnected elementary processing units, surrounded by a global circuitry.Office of Naval Research N00014-00-10429Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología TIC-1999-082

A CMOS silicon spin qubit

Silicon, the main constituent of microprocessor chips, is emerging as a promising material for the realization of future quantum processors. Leveraging its well-established complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology would be a clear asset to the development of scalable quantum computing architectures and to their co-integration with classical control hardware. Here we report a silicon quantum bit (qubit) device made with an industry-standard fabrication process. The device consists of a two-gate, p-type transistor with an undoped channel. At low temperature, the first gate defines a quantum dot (QD) encoding a hole spin qubit, the second one a QD used for the qubit readout. All electrical, two-axis control of the spin qubit is achieved by applying a phase-tunable microwave modulation to the first gate. Our result opens a viable path to qubit up-scaling through a readily exploitable CMOS platform.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Design and Implementation of Intelligent Home Automatic Control and Monitoring System

With the development of social economy and science and technology in China, the performance and application range of microprocessor chips are constantly improving. In the current era, the development of home towards intelligence has become the main trend. Therefore, it is an urgent problem to explore the home control system with stable state, strong practicability and lower power consumption cost. This paper analyzes the current situation of smart home and discusses its automatic control system

Space Applications of Automation, Robotics and Machine Intelligence Systems (ARAMIS). Volume 1: Executive Summary

Potential applications of automation, robotics, and machine intelligence systems (ARAMIS) to space activities, and to their related ground support functions are explored. The specific tasks which will be required by future space projects are identified. ARAMIS options which are candidates for those space project tasks and the relative merits of these options are defined and evaluated. Promising applications of ARAMIS and specific areas for further research are identified. The ARAMIS options defined and researched by the study group span the range from fully human to fully machine, including a number of intermediate options (e.g., humans assisted by computers, and various levels of teleoperation). By including this spectrum, the study searches for the optimum mix of humans and machines for space project tasks

Moore's Law and the Semiconductor Industry: A Vintage Model

Semiconductors, High Technology Industries,

The Essential Facilities Doctrine Under United States Antitrust Law

The issue of essential facilities has attracted renewed attention in Europe in recent years because of the controversy between IMS Health Inc. and NDC Health Corporation, two competitors in pharmaceutical data services in Germany . . . After an extensive investigation, the European Commission (EC) ordered that IMS grant access to the 1860 brick structure on commercially reasonable terms, and the EC decision is now on appeal in the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. One issue that emerged in that litigation is whether a decision by European authorities to grant access to the alleged essential facility, especially one whose market power derived in part from a copyright, would open a gap between European and U.S. antitrust law. In response to that contention, the authors of this piece filed a statement in the Court of First Instance describing U.S. law on the subject. We argued that the EC\u27s ruling is consistent with U.S. jurisprudence on the subject of essential facilities. The remainder of this article consists of a revised version of the Court of First Instance filing

An experimental multiprocessor system for distributed parallel computations.

The availability of low-cost microprocessor chips with efficient instruction sets for specific numerical tasks (signal processors) has been exploited for building a versatile multiprocessor system, consisting of a host minicomputer augmented by a number of joint processors. The host provides a multiuser-multitasking environment and manages system resources and task scheduling. User applications can call upon one or more joint processors for parallel execution of adequately partitioned, computationally intensive numeric operations. Each joint processor has sufficient local memory for storing procedures and data and has access to regions in host memory for shared data. Kernel processes in the host and in the joint processors provide the necessary mechanism for initialization and synchronization of the distributed parallel execution of procedures

Moore's Law, Competition and Intel's Productivity in the 1990s

In the mid-1990s, a pickup in measured productivity growth for the semiconductor industry coincided with an economy-wide acceleration in labor productivity growth. The pickup in semiconductor markets reflected an increase in the growth of real output that was generated by what Dale Jorgenson (2001) called an “inflection point” in the price indexes for the semiconductor industry. Jorgenson hypothesized that the inflection point reflected increases in the rate of product innovation made possible by an increase in Moore’s Law, a stylized description of technology that currently states that the number of electrical components on a chip will double every eighteen months. Within semiconductors, microprocessors (MPUs) produced by Intel—the world’s largest producer of the chips that serve as a computer’s central processing unit—were the primary contributor to the inflection point in the semiconductor index. The inflection point in the price index coincided with two changes in the price contours for Intel’s chips. First, price contours for Intel’s chips became steeper around 1995. Because most price index formulae boil down to functions of weighted averages of price change, steeper price contours translate directly into more rapidly declining price indexes. At the same time, the product lifecycle for MPUs—the length of time chips are sold in the market—shortened and Intel began to introduce chips more frequently. What caused these changes in pricing and product cycles? This paper provides a simple framework to help gain some intuition on these issues. The model provides a set of conditions under which an increase in Moore’s Law is consistent with both of these stylized facts. In the model, an increase in Moore’s Law raises the quality of future chips relative to today’s chips. If consumers view these chips as substitutes, then increases in the quality of tomorrow’s chips push down the prices for today’s chips and can, under certain conditions, generate an inflection point in the price index. However, the framework also suggests that changes in the attributes of contemporaneous substitutes can have the same effects. Thus, the model suggests that increases in the quality of competitor’s chips can generate an inflection point through the same channel. This is an important possibility to consider because Intel faced increasing competition from AMD beginning in the mid-1990s, about when the inflection point occurred.Semiconductor Industry, Price Measurement,product cycles