INTRODUCTION: THE IMPORTANCE OF SIGNAL INTEGRITY - Advanced Signal Integrity for High-Speed Digital Design - page 3

Computational capacity of the human race
600,000,000,000,000,000 MIPS

1.00E + 17

1.00E + 14

1.00E + 11

1.00E + 08

1.00E + 05

1.00E + 02

1.00E − 01

1.00E − 04

1.00E − 07

1.00E 10

−

1880 1900 1920 1940 1960 1980 2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
Year

Figure 1-2 Historical computational power and extrapolation into the future.

commonplace printed circuit boards (PCBs) built on an FR4 dielectric could not
support bus speeds faster than 300MHz [Porter, 1998]. Current designs using
FR4 substrates exceed that bus speed in commonplace personal computers by
almost 10-fold (PCI Express Gen 2 buses run at 5 giga-transfers per second,
which has a fundamental frequency of 2.5 GHz). History is filled with “experts”
who mispredicted the future:

Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.
—Lord Kelvin, British mathematician and physicist, president of the British Royal
Society, 1895

Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it,
ever.

—Thomas Edison, American inventor, 1889

Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe,
would die of asphyxia.
—Dr Dionysys Larder (1793-1859), professor of natural philosophy and
astronomy, University College London

In the mid-1970s, integrated circuits held approximately 10,000 components,
which was enough to construct an entire computer with devices as small as 3 m.

Experienced engineers worried that semiconductor technology had reached its
pinnacle. Three micrometers was barely larger than the wavelength of the light

µ