Page 33 - Engineering Digital Design

CHAPTER 1 / INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AND GLOSSARY

activities, medical requirements, routine business transactions, appointment schedules, and
many others imaginable.
Optical recognition technology will improve dramatically in the fields of robotics, vehi-
cular operation, and security systems. For example, expect that iris and retinal pattern
recognition will eventually be used to limit access to certain protected systems and areas,
and may even replace digital combination locks, IDs, and licenses for such purposes.
Taxation, marketing, and purchasing methods will undergo dramatic changes as digital
systems become commonplace in the world of government, commerce, and finance. Even
the world of politics, as we now know it, will undergo dramatic change with the use of new
and more efficient voting and voter sampling methods. Mass production line manufacturing
methods by using robots and other digitally automated mechanical devices will continue to
evolve at a rapid pace as dictated by domestic and world market forces. Expect that logic
minimization tools and automated digital design tools will become more commonplace
and sophisticated, permitting designers with little practical experience to design relatively
complex systems.
Business networking will undergo dramatic improvements with the continued devel-
opment of gigabit Ethernet links and high-speed switching technology. Home connectiv-
ity will see vast improvements in satellite data service downloading (up to 400 kbps),
56-kbps (and higher) modems that need high-quality digital connections between phones
and destination, improved satellite data service with bidirectional data transmission, and
DSL (digital subscriber line) cable modem systems.
Finally, there are some really exciting areas to watch. Look for speech recognition, speech
synthesis, and handwriting and pattern recognition to dramatically change the manner in
which we communicate with and make use of the computer both in business and in the
home. Somewhere in the future the computer will be equipped with speech understanding
capability that allows the computer to build ideas from a series of spoken words — perhaps
like HAL 9000 in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Built-in automatic learning capability
may yet prove to be the most challenging undertaking facing computer designers of the
future. Thus, expect to see diminished use of the computer keyboard with time as these
technologies evolve into common usage.
Revolutionary computer breakthroughs may come with the development of radically
different technologies. Carbon nanotube technology, for example, has the potential to
propel computer speeds well into the gigahertz range together with greatly reduced power
dissipation. The creation of carbon nanotube transistors could signal the dawn of a new
revolution in chip development. Then there is the specter of the quantum computer, whose
advent may lead to computing capabilities that are trillions of times faster than those of
conventional supercomputers. All of this is expected to be only the beginning of a new
millennium of invention limited only by imagination. Remember that radically different
technological breakthroughs can appear at any time, even without warning, and can have a
dramatic affect on our lives, hopefully for the better.
To accomplish all of the preceding, a new generation of people, technically oriented to
cope with the rapidly changing digital systems technology, will result as it must. This new
generation of people will have a dramatic impact on education, labor, politics, transportation,
and communications, and will most certainly affect domestic and global economies. Thus,
expect that more pressure and responsibility will be placed on universities to produce the
quality training that can match up to this challenge, not just over a short period but also in
the long term.