Reconfigurable Future

Predicting the future is notoriously hard. Sometimes I feel that the only real guarantee is that the future will happen, and that someone will point out how it’s not like what was predicted. Nevertheless, we seem intent on trying to figure out what will happen, and worse yet, recording these views so they can be later used against us. So here I go... Scaling has been driving the whole electronics industry, allowing it to produce chips with more transistors at a lower cost. But this trend is a double-edged sword: We not only need to figure out more complex devices, which people want, but we also must determine which complex devices lots of people want, as we have to sell many, many chips to amortize the significant design cost.