SILICON is the driving force behind the information superhighway, multimedia and all the other much-hyped trends that have suddenly been noticed by the media in the past two years. This iiiformation revolution has been made possible by the phenomenal advances in the manufacture of silicon-based integrated circuits. The cost of storing or processing a single bit of information has fallen by factors of a million over the last couple of decades. Indeed, consumers can now put the equivalent of a 1983 supercomputer on their kitchen table.
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