The relentless march of the microchip

The first sixty years of computing have seen spectacular progress in the technology, driven for the last forty years by Moore's Law which, though initially an observation, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy and a board-room planning tool. Ever shrinking transistor dimensions have yielded increasingly complex and cost-effective microchips, a win-win scenario that has driven the explosion in the use of digital electronics and enabled computers to be embedded into a vast range of high-volume products. However, there are limits to how small a transistor can be made, and one can no longer assume that smaller circuits will go faster, or be more power-efficient. As we approach atomic limits device variability is beginning to hurt, and the cost of microchip design is spiralling upwards. On the desktop, technology changes are driving a trend away from high-speed uniprocessors towards multi-core, and soon many-core, processors, despite the fact that general-purpose parallel programming remains one of the great unsolved problems of computer science. If the cost-effectiveness of microchip technology is to continue to improve there are major challenges ahead involving understanding how to build reliable systems on increasingly unreliable technology and how to exploit parallelism increasingly effectively, not only to improve performance, but also to mask the consequences of component failure. Biological systems demonstrate many of the properties we aspire to incorporate into engineered technology, and therefore are a possible source of ideas to incorporate into future novel computation systems. This lecture discusses current research at Manchester into the development of the 'Brain Box' computer, which is a contribution to the computing Grand Challenge of 'Understanding the Architecture of Brain and Mind', and will provide a platform for the investigation of these important issues that face the microchip industry in the near future.