"jawod" wrote in message ...
Please explain vlsi and smart dust to a newbie.

Think "nanites" from Star Trek: The Borg Generation.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_dust

It's a popular research topic these days, but as far as I'm aware all the
commercial applications are still nowhere near the "grain of rice" size that
the proponents would like to achieve -- power sources become a real problem at
that size, even if you only do need to communicate with the next node that's
only, say, 10' away.

Oh... VLSI is "very large scale integration." It just indicates an IC that
has "[mumble]-many million transistor," where the actual number is subjective.
A 32 bit CPU is VLSI, a 74LS00 ain't.

---Joel