Microprocessors

I-Introduction

Microprocessors have had a monumental impact on our society. Microprocessors are the heart of all computing and most electronic device. They are the basis of all the technological discoveries for the past two decades. A microprocessor contains a semiconductor chip, most often built from silicon, at its heart. In this paper I am going to briefly explain the way semiconductors changed our life then explain their constitution and how they work. But, today we are touching the limits of currents methods and techniques so; I am going to expose what could be the future of Microprocessors.

II-A bit of history

A microprocessor -- also known as a CPU or central processing unit -- is a complete computation engine that is fabricated on a single chip. The first microprocessor was the Intel 4004, introduced in 1971. The 4004 was not very powerful -- all it could do was add and subtract, and it could only do that 4 bits at a time. But it was amazing that everything was on one chip. Prior to the 4004, engineers built computers either from collections of chips or from discrete components (transistors wired one at a time). The 4004 powered one of the first portable electronic calculators.

Intel 8080

The first microprocessor to make it into a home computer was the Intel 8080, a complete 8-bit computer on one chip, introduced in 1974. The first microprocessor to make a real splash in the market was the Intel 8088, introduced in 1979 and incorporated into the IBM PC (which first appeared around 1982). If you are familiar with the PC market and its history, you know that the PC market moved from the 8088 to the 80286 to the 80386 to the 80486 to the Pentium to the Pentium II to the Pentium III to the Pentium 4. All of these microprocessors are made by Intel and all of them are improvements on the basic design of the 8088. The Pentium 4 can execute any piece of code that ran on the original 8088, but it does it about 5,000 times faster!

All these improvements were only possible with many technological and industrial discoveries involving new production techniques, more precise engraving, faster clock speeds and more. Below is a table that shows the evolution of Intel microprocessors since the 70s. It displays various data; Date: The year that the processor was first introduced. Many processors are re-introduced at higher clock speeds for many years after the original release date. Transistors: the number of transistors on the chip. You can see that the number of transistors on a single chip has risen steadily over the years. Microns: the width, in microns, of the smallest wire on the chip. For comparison, a human hair is 100 microns thick. As the feature size on the chip goes down, the number of transistors rises. Clock