Beyond Mobile: A Computer the Size of a Grain of Sand

When so-called "minicomputers" first appeared in the 1970s, they supplanted mainframes on a scale of size and cost expressed by Bell's Law, which holds that a new class of smaller, cheaper computers comes along roughly every 10 years. Personal computers, notebooks, smartphones, and tablets followed, and the latest entry was displayed last month at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

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