This paper includes a section dealing with the basic technology used in COTS IT and the way in which the use of the technology is growing. Moore's Law ^ says the performance of silicon microchips doubles every 18 months for no extra cost and appears to have another 10 years to go.
• Reduction of feature size in semiconductor processes continue to progress at about 30% every three years - 0.18p in 1999,0.15p in 2001, and 0.1 p forecast by 2006.
• High-end processor chips run at 750 MHz with four million transistors per chip. By 2003, the most powerful microprocessors will run at 1500 MHz with 18 million transistors per chip. The next generation of processor architectures will have at least 10 billion instructions per second per chip in the initial products.
• Semiconductor memory is providing 60% more bits/chip/year. The cost of semiconductor memory is now around 50 cents per megabit and the number of megabits per dollar is likely to double every 18 months for the next few years. The latest Technology Forward Look Pq)er from the ITEC Foresight Panel expects the first commercial applications of 1- Gigabit semiconductor memoiy chips in 2002 and 1 Terabit between 2007 and 2010. In 10 years, developments will hit the physical limitations of lithography. However, the $2 billion cost of the fabrication facilities may slow progress earlier.
Computing is moving into the consumer price domain, and becoming embedded in a huge range of products. Forbes Magazine***'" estimated 99% of all microprocessors manufactured go into embedded systems not into personal computers. In 1997, the industry shipped about 300 million 16/32-bit microprocessor chips, two-thirds for embedded systems There have also been dramatic advances in on-line magnetic disc storage with hard disc capacities growing at around 60% per year. A current CD-ROM stores 650 Mbytes and DVD technology increases this seven fold. However, a survey article in Forbes Magazine ***’'' predicts that bits stored magnetically will become unstable at densities of around 40 - 80 Gbits per square inch. Applying Moore's Law, there is another 5 - 1 0 years of disc storage progress, with new technology in the pipeline.
The Internet was developed in the late 1960s as a US DoD experiment to link American universities. Two developments transformed the Internet into a worldwide information medium - the invention of the WWW in 1989 and the introduction in 1993 of the first multimedia Web browser. The Internet has grown to a user base of between 60-100 million within four years; the growth rate showing no signs of diminishing. The anticipated number of Internet users will reach 300 - 1000 million by the end of 2000. The Internet is already becoming a viable alternative to the telephone network for fax and even for voice.
Radical innovations and huge investments have brought about great change and disruption in the technical and business structures of global telecommunications. In particular mobile communications have developed very rapidly over the past 10 years. Over the next five years, the
five largest projects plan to spend $25 billion putting up over 500 satellites, offering global wireless communications services
A key driver and enabler is the rate at which the necessary common standards emerge, diffuse, stabilise and become pervasive. There has been conflict between top-down, de jure, global and bureaucratic standards used by telecommunications and CCITT; and bottom up, de facto ad-hoc standards typical of the Internet and the personal computer. There have been some very important successes on both sides. The world's communications infrastructure now runs basically on just two protocols; the Internet depends on TCP/IP from the public, global, de facto but ad-hoc camp.
In computing, UNIX® and NT are the two de facto industry standard platforms. In neither case has any de jure public standards body made any pivotal contribution. Now, HTML and its derivatives from the open, public WWW community are emerging. There has been intense competition to establish the de facto industry standard browser and a universal standard for transporting program code around the Internet.
The paper stresses the extent of IT dependence in the national infrastructure, mentioning that computers and networking are now mission-critical to most kinds of business activity. In telecommunications, the combined global telephone network and Internet is the largest and most complex system ever built. The transport infrastructure crucially depends on IT. National retail/ distribution networks have thousands of point of sale computers and complex supporting IT systems linking suppliers, distributors, banks and credit card companies. Financial services depend entirely on huge IT system, from secure ATM machines to electronic stock exchanges. Government itself is one of the biggest users of IT for tax, social services, health and the like. Large national and international companies also boast major corporate IT networks. To all of this can be added the tens of millions of personal computers now found in most businesses and many households.
As this IT, and the national dependence on it, is virtually all COTS, it bodes well for the future availability and support for militaiy use of COTS IT.
4.11.1 Review of information
This paper, by the then President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and published in their two-monthly journal, provides an important background to the rapid development of COTS IT. It indicates the progress that has been made and will continue to be made in all areas of IT. It shows where the pressures are emerging from and its importance to governments. The fact that it makes virtually no mention of defence, highlights the relative unimportance of this sector in the overall development of information technology. Despite this, it suggests that the pervasiveness, availability and support are likely benefits for military applications.