Toshiba Corp predicts that a PC-on-a-chip will arrive on the market at some point between 2003 and 2005. Speaking at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuit Conference in Santa Clara, California, Hidemi Inshiuchi from Toshiba’s Microelectronics Engineering laboratory said the PC-on-a-chip will become a reality when 0.12 to 0.13 micron design techniques are integrated with 512Mb Dynamic Random Access Memory and 2m logic gates on a chip. The integrated circuits in the 0.12 and 0.13 micron era must also have a dual gate oxide film structure, to improve levels of performance. Inshiuchi also recommended that semiconductor businesses should use embedded DRAM processes as the technology driver for semiconductor technologies in the emerging integrated circuit space.
