In other corners of the semiconductor industry, advances were coming rapidly as well. Single-chip digital signal processors (DSPs) arrived in the late seventies and improved dramatically in the eighties, working their way into communications and process control applications. Fixed-point programmable DSPs were followed by floating-point types, enhancing their scope of applications.
DSPs filled an important niche, addressing many applications for which general-purpose microprocessors weren't well suited. For other applications, particularly in the consumer arena, analog and mixed-signal circuitry was required. The eighties saw a great deal of development in digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital conversion technology. Mixed-signal technology proved central to digital audio equipment. Compact disc players went portable by 1984, as did many other consumer products. Miniaturized TV sets with color LCD screens, digital audio tape recorders, and high-fidelity stereo VCRs all appeared around mid-decade. By 1988, sales of compact discs had topped those of long-playing phonograph records. Despite the protests of analog-loving audiophiles, there was no denying that the future of audio was digital.
The continued drive toward portability and miniaturization of electronic systems, which included laptop PCs by the latter part of the decade, depended on improvements in battery technology and power management. Operating voltages for commodity logic circuits began dropping, first from 5 V to 3.3 V and then, by the end of the eighties, to 2.5 V. That meant a corresponding rise in current consumption and new challenges for designers of power-management circuitry. Nickel-cadmium batteries became the option of choice for portable consumer electronics.
Design requirements were growing in complexity, and the design infrastructure was again finding itself stressed. IC designs were so large and unwieldy that despite the gains in computer and graphic display technology, designers were unable in many cases to see the "big picture" as they pieced together massive circuits. Design work had to be automated to achieve the productivity that shorter design cycles demanded.
A big step came around 1982 when minicomputers from Apollo were adapted for use in turnkey CAD systems by startups like Mentor Graphics and Daisy. But a turning point was reached in 1984 with the creation of the Verilog hardware description language (HDL). HDLs like Verilog and VHDL represented a higher level of abstraction than gates, allowing designers to see more of their design on screen at a time and thus giving them more of the "big picture" that they could no longer get designing at the gate level. The move up to register-transfer level, though, left a gap. How would designs created at the new higher level of abstraction be translated back into the gate level?
The answer was found in logic synthesis, a technology pioneered in 1986 by Synopsys. Logic synthesis, though inefficient at first, was a new paradigm in large-scale chip design. It enabled IC designers to think bigger than ever and spawned tremendous growth in what is now known as the electronic design automation (EDA) industry. Later, logic synthesis was accompanied by advances in place-and-route technology as well as design verification.
The widespread prevalence and acceptance of personal computing in the eighties, along with the rapid growth of online activity, created the beginnings of change for communications technology. Networking, fueled by the proliferation of Ethernet local-area networks, brought huge improvements in productivity to offices and manufacturing facilities. Now that computers were everywhere, they needed to be able to communicate efficiently, and networks were expanding at a phenomenal rate.
Seeds for even greater change were sown in 1987 when Bellcore introduced the concept of asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), which brought with it the potential for multimedia transmission over the nation's copper loops. Fiber optics also came more heavily into play as the first transatlantic fiber link was completed in 1988. The foundations for the World Wide Web had been laid, and not a moment too soon.
A revolution in communications was under way, but that revolution would have a second front. The emergence of broadband technology would serve to feed the ravenous appetite for bandwidth that the Web would develop. Soon, however, an ever-restless society would tire of being tethered to the desktop. This time, the revolution would not only be televised but also beamed through wireless links to cell phones, personal digital assistants, and other portables. Computers, telephones, and televisions all joined together in a symphony that brought down all of the walls and left us at the doorstep to a mobile future.
Click here for several examples of the special photos in this picture album.
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