Semiconductor innovation: Is the party over, or just getting started?

Semiconductor Innovation Trends: The hardware paradigm underpinning the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry has experienced three major shifts over the past 60 years - the mainframe era, the personal computing era, and the Internet of Things era (Figure 1.1.1). During this period, the user-to-device ratio inverted; the mainframe era's many-to-one ratio has become a one-to-many ratio. Today, users are outnumbered by the devices they access, and even more significantly outnumbered by the instrumented nodes on which they rely. This exponential growth in devices and nodes has created a virtuous cycle of pervasive digitization and automation that is driving an even greater need for devices and nodes.