Excerpts from an interview with National Semiconductor CEO Brian Halla:
It’s fine to do zeros and ones for spreadsheets, and that’s why the PC uses the least amount of analog. But we’re not doing spreadsheets anymore. We’re doing digital photography. We’re downloading images and graphics from the Internet, and we’re doing more and more stuff wirelessly. All of that is analog.
At Berkeley they are looking at a 10 gigabit-per-second radio with an onboard variable length inductor that can change its personality. You walk into the red carpet room at the airport and your PDA or your personal computer starts sniffing the air to see if there is a 2G, or a 2.5G, or 802.11b network. It covers the spectrum and it picks the cheapest path to the IP backbone and configures itself to be that radio. Let’s say you’re doing something that’s voice intensive. It will still keep sniffing to see if another protocol gets introduced that is even cheaper.
