Chips that do things [The Last Byte]

One of the first things the author thought of when looking through the papers on microfluidic biochips in this issue of IEEE Design & Test is that Moore´s Law did not apply to them. They may get bigger, but physical constraints on the size of fluid drops going through the grids in them means that the chips are not going to get much denser. But did this have to be true? It is concluded that we will always make chips with which to simulate or model the world, through analysis or games. But we are starting to make chips which can do actual work, do chemistry, and perhaps do nanolevel 3-D printing. MEMS accelerometers already tell us if the car we are driving in is in a crash, and deploys an air bag to try to save us. The designers of today understand virtual worlds; the designers of tomorrow are going to have to get real.