Miniaturization Miniaturization Miniaturization (Br.Eng.: "Miniaturisation") is the trend to manufacture ever smaller mechanical, optical and electronic products and devices. Examples include miniaturization of mobile phones, computers and vehicle engine downsizing. In electronics, Moore's law, which was named after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, predicted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit for minimum component cost doubles every 18 months. This enables processors to be built in smaller sizes. The history of miniaturization is associated with the history of information technology based on the succession of switching devices, each smaller, faster, cheaper than its predecessor. During the period referred to as
Intel iAPX 432 operated as a channel controller for I/O, and an Attached Processor (AP), a conventional Intel 8086 which provided "processing power in the I/O subsystem". These were some of the largest designs of the era. The two-chip GDP had a combined count of approximately 97,000 transistors while the single chip IP had approximately 49,000. By comparison, the Motorola 68000 (introduced in 1979) had approximately 40,000 transistors. In 1983, Intel released two additional integrated circuits for the iAPX 432 Interconnect Architecture: the 43204 Bus Interface Unit (BIU) and 43205 Memory Control Unit (MCU). These chips allowed for nearly glueless multiprocessor systems with