Mems the word for Intel

Will Intel ever make printer engines? When it comes to predicting the chip giant's future, it's hard to know where things will end up.

After all, who would have guessed 10 years ago that the majority of Intel's production capability in 2002 would be used to produce memory? Given that a major part of its Pentium 4 and Itanium chips is nothing more than cache memory, this is a fact - strange but true.

One thing is for sure: Intel needs to find new products for new markets, and it better not be too slow about it. Put simply, the trouble facing Intel is that most people who want an Intel-based phone or PC already own one.

Intel's markets are not growing fast, so it needs to diversify to keep the shareholders happy. Whether or not its server chips become established is immaterial because they will always be high-cost, low-volume parts. Intel's speciality is low-cost, high-volume chips.

Fortunately, a few tweaks to Intel's production process could enable the company to produce micro electro-mechanical systems (Mems). NEC and a few others have been making projectors using specialised silicon chips for a few years.

They are often called micro-mirror projectors because they have millions of minute mirrors built into a chip that can be rapidly repositioned to produce a projected image.

Rather than mirrors, the main characteristic of Mems technology could be summarised as chips that include movable parts. As more manufacturers get involved, the range of applications for Mems will grow. For example, the world's first printers built with Mems technology will ship this week.

The printers are made by Agfa, and the Mems parts are made by Cypress Semiconductor.

With a little more refinement Mems technology could be used to make radios. Within a few years Intel hopes to be able to fit all the components of a radio onto a silicon chip.

A few years after that it hopes to be able to make processors with an on-chip radio, in much the same way that it currently makes processors with on-chip cache memory.

Unlike current radio devices, which are basically manufactured to work at a specific frequency and protocol, the new generation of silicon radios will be programmable, so the same chip could be used in a variety of ways.

Long term, the goal is that these radios will form ad hoc peer-to-peer networks, sometimes referred to 'sensors' by researchers.

It's easy to see the attraction of these capabilities to makers of PDAs and, with a little more thought, even desktop PCs and servers could benefit from this sort of wireless connectivity.

Whether Intel will ever get round to making printer engines is doubtful, but the days of it surviving largely on the sales of cache memory are fading fast.