Impact of New Chip Technologies on Consumer Products

New chip technologies have become available at an unprecedented pace. The driving force has largely been the EDP industry because computers can use any increase in speed, density and complexity that could be achieved. In the trail of this EDP progress Consumer Products have picked their grains to get a share in the success and provide new (CD, cordless phone) or improved (digital tv, vcr) functions to consumers. This paper provides, by means of concrete examples, a indication of the challenges that consumer electronics products pose to the IC technologies. It is shown what sort of technological improvements are needed to make new or improved functions possible under the stringent consumer rules of low cost, high reliability and easy-to-use.