million dollars. And the potential for plunder is sobering: Daily now, banks transfer more than 500 billion dollars around the U.S. by computer. Electronic lawbreakers may hit harder and more often in the future, as personal computers multiply the means to penetrate computer systems and dramatically increase the number of people familiar with them. Drug runners and bookmakers already use personal computers, and other organized criminals will likely make them outright accomplices. Teenagers, as easily as if vandalizing empty houses, have wrought long-distance havoc with their keyboards. Using telephone lines as a link, two California boys tampered with racehorse and greyhound pedigrees stored in a computer in Kentucky, and for a time the files of some Canadian corporations were an open book to youngsters at school computers in Manhattan. Children of their time, you may lament, making mischief in a fashion ushered in with incredible rapidity by the chip. With such swiftness that you may conclude a revolution in our lives is well under way. Yet it has hardly begun. In decades to come the technology of this age of the chip will surely seem minor, gradually dwarfed by its sweeping social effects. Some will come as we put the chip to new uses. Chips aside, the latest artificial limbs and organs are not fundamentally new-unlike the microcircuits some scientists speculate we may one day implant in our heads to augment our intelligence. As well, the chip will add new dimensions to old social issues. In an economy based on robots, how will we share wealth, now commonly distributed in the form of jobs? Deepest change of all, the chip will alter our self-image. Apes that master sign language and use tools have already shaken the idea that to have ideas is to be human, a view likely to decline even further if machines too begin thinking. Such profound adjustments seem to be the unavoidable and unsettling price of living in the age of the chip. But not too great a price, for in paying it we stand to gain the benefit of exercising some of our best virtues: patience, flexibility, wisdom. B. MATERIALS SUBMITTED BY THOMAS DUNLAP AND RICHARD STERN CHIPS O CHIP - A COLLECTION OF TRANSISTORS ON A SINGLE STRUCTURE WHICH WORK TOGETHER TO PERFORM A PARTICULAR O CHIPS ARE USED AS THE BRAINS AND MEMORIES OF: AUTOMOBILE FUEL AND OMISSION CONTROL SYSTEMS ROBOTICS MINICOMPUTERS MAINFRAME COMPUTERS CALCULATORS TELECOMMUNICATION EQUIPMENT ELECTRONIC GAMES MEDICAL EQUIPMENT WORD PROCESSING EQUIPMENT COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN/COMPUTER AIDED MANUFACTURING O BASIC BUILDING BLOCK OF A CHIP IS A TRANSISTOR. O THE TRANSISTOR IS FABRICATED ON A MATERIAL KNOWN AS A SEMICONDUCTOR (TYPICALLY SILICON), HOW TO DESIGN A CHIP O A CIRCUIT DESIGN ENGINEER DEVELOPS A CIRCUIT TO O A LAYOUT DESIGN ENGINEER TRANSFERS THE CIRCUIT DESIGN INTO A SET OF PATTERNS WHICH WILL EVENTUALLY BE IMPRINTED ON A WAFER TO FORM A CHIP. ("MASK WORK") O THE LAYOUT WILL BE EMBODIED ON A MAGNETIC TAPE. O A "MASK" IS MADE FROM THE TAPE FOR EACH PATTERN. MASKS ARE GLASS OR METAL PLATES WITH A SINGLE PATTERN IMPRINTED ON THEM BUT THE MASK CONTAINS PATTERNS FOR 0 THE MASKS ARE PLACED IN A PRINTER (CAMERA). 0 THE PRINTER IMPRINTS THE PATTERN ON THE WAFER. 0 HOW TO COPY A CHIP SECTION 4(3)(A) OF THE ACT CALLS IT EMBODYING A MASK O OBTAIN PUBLICLY AVAILABLE PACKAGED CHIP. O TAKE OFF THE LID. 0 PHOTOGRAPH THE CHIP. 0 CAREFULLY MEASURE THE TOP LAYER OF THE CHIP AND DRAW IT O ETCH OFF ONE LAYER AT A TIME AND CAREFULLY MEASURE THE NEXT LAYER UNTIL YOU HAVE MEASURED EACH LAYER OF THE CHIP. O YOU NOW HAVE A TAPE WHICH CAN BE COPIED INTO THE VARIOUS FORMS THAT YOU NEED TO MANUFACTURE THE CHIP. |