SoC - what are our technology futures?

Many of us discovered that we were working in System-on-Chip technology by default! The technology to put hundreds of millions of transistors on a monolithic CMOS digital chip became available over the past few years; we adopted it and became de facto SoC researchers. However, as SoC has come on stream we have also started to see cracks appearing in the technology. 3rd order effects of just a few years ago have become predominant problems, and previous performance predictions have been shown to be false. This talk will undoubtedly produce more questions than answers, but, as an interested observer of the technologies we play with in our sand box, I will try to ponder on some of the issues - and muse on how those amongst us, who normally only observe, can also play a role in defining and exploring promising future technologies.