The semiconductor industry has a proven track record of quickly reducing

reference to IC design scale to the ridiculously irrelevant. We, as a group,

quickly saturated our terminology to refer to levels of integration as we

applied the term "Large Scale Integration" (LSI) in the mid 80 s to chips

containing more than 1,000 transistors and moved to the more progressive

"Very Large Scale" (VLSI) as we passed into the 10,000 to 100,000

transistor territory only a year or two later. A few more attempts at renaming

our design output with terms such as ULSI (Ultra-Large Scale Integration)

were fortunately left in the annals of history as the more insightful realized

that the consequences of Moore s Law would quickly require us to move

beyond the confines of the English language to create appropriate

superlatives.