It seems like on a daily basis, people are asking me how they can put a smaller through-hole into a smaller pad that is attached to a smaller trace. They are asking so that they can design a smaller flex or PBC to go into, you guessed it, a smaller electronic widget. So I have to ask, “When will the freakin’ shrinkin’ end?” At what point will the widgets finally be deemed “small enough”? Don’t get me wrong. I really like the fact that I can now carry my entire music library on an MP3 player the size of a credit card. Not that many years ago, it would have taken a very large trunk full of cassette tapes or a pickup truck load of eight track tapes to accomplish that feat. At the same time, if cell phones get any smaller, we are going to have to start genetically engineering people with smaller ears and fingers to use them.

I have to admit, though, that the shrinking of electronic devices has been nothing short of amazing. The last time that I went through airport security, I had to empty my pockets of all my electronic widgets. The first thing to go in the tray was my company blackberry with which I can send and retrieve email from almost anywhere in the world. It was followed by my MP3 player that contains about a gazillion hours of music and 20 full-length movies. Next into the tray went my portable navigation system that allows me to venture out from my hotel in the evening in search of a place to eat, and gives me reasonable confidence that I will find my way back again. That little gem holds over six million restaurants, gas stations, hotels, and pretty much any other place you would ever want to go plus a lot of places you would never want to go. The last widget in the tray was my personal cell phone. Call me spoiled, but it is just more comfortable to talk on that phone than the blackberry. As I slid the tray on to the conveyer belt, I calculated in my head the total memory of those four devices (engineers do that, we can’t help it). The total was over 120 G. To put that into perspective, my first home computer was a Commodore 64 K. I would need 1.56 million Commodore 64 computers to do the job of these four tiny devices. As I stuffed them back into my pockets and grabbed my bag, I thought to myself, maybe shinkin’ stuff ain’t so bad after all!!