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OCCASION This publication has been made available to the public on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation. DISCLAIMER This document has been produced without formal United Nations editing. The designations employed and the presentation of the material in this document do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries, or its economic system or degree of development. Designations such as “developed”, “industrialized” and “developing” are intended for statistical convenience and do not necessarily express a judgment about the stage reached by a particular country or area in the development process. Mention of firm names or commercial products does not constitute an endorsement by UNIDO. FAIR USE POLICY Any part of this publication may be quoted and referenced for educational and research purposes without additional permission from UNIDO. However, those who make use of quoting and referencing this publication are requested to follow the Fair Use Policy of giving due credit to UNIDO. CONTACT Please contact [email protected] for further information concerning UNIDO publications. For more information about UNIDO, please visit us at www.unido.org UNITED NATIONS INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION Vienna International Centre, P.O. Box 300, 1400 Vienna, Austria Tel: (+43-1) 26026-0 · www.unido.org · [email protected] 11111111111111111111111111111111 lllll lllll lllll llll llll 21123 XD9700043 EMERGING TECHNOLOGY SERIES 2/1996 Info1mation Technology UNITED NATIONS INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATION Vienna, 1996 TO OUR READERS EMERGING This issue of Information Technology brings a special article on a TECHNOLOGY comparison of national information policies. lt advocates, in conclusion, SERIES those policies that "reflect an adequate understanding of current international trends". I can only agree with such a statement. At the same INFORMATION time, however, I would like to stress that those "trends" mean much more TECHNOLOGY than technological and economic ones. In a similar manner to the tax policy of a country, which controls the way the country's economy 2/1996 develops, at the same time providing financial input to the country's budget, information technology policy, apart from influencing domestic and export components of production and application of IT, leads the country CONTENTS to a new age of the Information Society - an age that despite the IT achievements we witness today - hardly even began. SPECIAL ARTICLE In the last few years, the Internet was launched and went public. Already NATIONAL /NF OR MA TION now, far from its final shape, it has created a new social dimension TECHNOLOGY POLICIES: AN comparable only to the explosion of television some forty years ago. TV INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON brought a vision of the world into our homes, changing our leisure, the selection of what we buy and how we elect our presidents and public by G. Harindranath representatives. The Internet will change our lives even more. Forthcoming "electronic money" is just an example. It is difficult to foresee NEWS AND EVENTS what the IT dominated world will look like, but it will certainly be very NEW DEVELOPMENTS · different from the contemporary world. The Internet is the first, but not the last component of the change. One should realize that perhaps 99.9999 MARKET TRENDS AND per cent of information processing machines currently in use all around the world are Von Neuman machines with essentially the same basic design COMPANY NEWS philisophy (the use of the instruction counter) developed for the EDVAC APPLICATIONS machine m 1948. Those machines, with the instruction counter, are called computers. Recent advances in technology now facilitate different design SOFTWARE philisophies, and an emergence of self-organizing machines with capabilities far beyond those of a computer is only a matter of time. The COUNTRY NEWS social and economic impact that these machines will perhaps exceed the impact that we experience nowadays through the use of computers. AUTOMATION The above considerations were introduced to justify my opinion that the IT STANDARDIZATION & policy of a country should, apart from production/application cues, provide a strong, long-lasting social component aimed at adjusting socie~ to the LEGISLATION changes IT is introducing with the increasing acceleration of our lives. RECENT PUBLICATIONS Education as a sole remedy for the social impact of IT is not enough. I have a feeling that social adjustment guided by national IT policy should, to the same extent, develop knowledge of IT through education, as render social acceptance of the change IT brings. UNIDO's Emerging Technology Series is established as a mechanism of current awareness to monitor developments in Knowledge may be the driving force of the information, but what counts the microelectronics sector and inform most in competitive manufacturing is accurate information and having it governments, industry and academia, primarily in developing countries. available in the right place at the right time. As competitivity and the complexity of modern industry increase, even small firms need more The Series on Information Technology is information processing capacity than their senior management can usually issues four times a year and distributed free of charge to readers in developing muster. So, whether you are a factory manager, an engineer or company countries. It is not a formal document and information specialist, or a government planner needing quick, reliable and has been reproduced without formal editing. Opinions expressed here do not focused information, today's response almost has to be a database. Some necessarily reflect the views of UNIDO. firms design computerized institutional memories from scratch, integrating Mention of the names of firms and commercial products does not imply an them with expert systems that also diagnose problems and advise endorsement by UNIDO. Copyrighted solutions. Depending on the type of information required, others rely on · material reproduced in the Series may be commercial application packages. UNIDO's new Information Resource· quoted only with permission of the journals concerned. Other material may Management System (IRMS) falls into a third group of specialized be quoted or reproduced without further systems focusing on a wide variety of data and how industry managers permission. Due acknowledgement is requested. use them. The !RMS is generally available to government departments, industrial companies and institutions as an integrated information processing packa9e. It can be tailored to individual needs of the user Scientific editor: Konrad Fialkowski Compiled and edited: Diana Rhind organization, and 1s specially designed to operate in decentralized Editorial Board: V. Podshibyakin; networks. Configured particularly to support the activities of information P. Makin; A. Spina; R. Bullington; c Gurkok. centres and the information needs of small- and medium-sized firms, the package handles two information types - metadata for 9eneral references, Published in 1996 by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and technical data. The software basis is UNESCO's M1cro-ISIS, topped (UNIDO) up with Pascal programmes for user friendliness. A special formatting Industrial Information Section (ITPD) language allows data to be prepared in a form usable by other software Vienna International Centre P.O. Box 300 packages such as expert systems and geographic information systems. A-1400 Vienna Further information can be supplied by Ms. Shadia Bakhait of the Austria Industrial Information Section, Investment and Technology Promotion Tel.: (43-1) 21131-0 Division (e-mail: [email protected] via the Internet). Fax: (43-1) 230-7355 e-mail: [email protected] Konrad Fialkowski Printed in Austria Scientific Frlitnr Information Technology and Microelectronics I 99612 CONTENrs Page Page A. SPECIAL ARTICLE . 1 Chromium hydride cluster exhibits unusual magnetic behaviour . 17 NATIONAL INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY POLI- Teflon protects superconducting devices from CIES: AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON .... corrosion . 17 Abstract ........................ Microporous surface on silicon wafer shown Introduction ..................... to be bioactive . 17 Production at the expense of diffusion: the Hitachi promises terabit storage . 17 case of India . I A better chip . 18 Brazil, the Indian experience revisited . 2 Creating order with disorder . 18 Constraints on IT diffusion: the policy ex- Prototyping as a production process . 18 perience in Africa . 2 Image processing for large colour pictures . 18 Balancing diffusion and production: the case Accepting analog inputs; producing digital of the "intelligent island" . 3 outputs . 18 IT diffusion and production: the need to Strong-ARM debut . 19 nurture . 3 Three steps to IC making . 19 Sony develops optical data storage tech- B. NEWS AND EVENTS . 6 nology . 19 Samsung makes 2 bit per cell memory using Forecast for 2006 . 6 NAND flash . 19 Information technology: asynchronous Sun demonstrates 'paperback' Java-based transfer mode switches are the latest to thrill Internet computer . 19 Silicon Valley . 6 Toshiba claims chip advance . 20 Arizona promises key for remote security . 7 New RISC core . 20 Wireless