Along with all their other implications, the mass adoption of mobile phones represents the first step in the single-chip era.

If you look inside the guts of your phone you are unlikely to find a big honking circuit board. (The circuit board illustration is from Sciencetechnologyresources.com.) Instead you will find one, two or three single chips performing major functions in an integrated way.

This is happening across-the-board in technology. We've gone from circuit boards in the 1980s to modules in the 1990s, to single chips. Just as early IBM PC add-in board producers created "multi-function cards" to assure a price worthy of retail distribution 20 years ago, so chip makers today put multiple functions on many chips, creating entire systems no bigger than a finger-nail.

Here's just one example from today's news, an 802.11 chip with embedded Internet routing from Marvell. It's being offered to makers of game machines, mobile phones, and other products, but increasingly such devices can stand on their own, as real products, and cases that require only interfaces to be useful.

Now, if that interface is via a network, so that the user can direct the device from a remote PC (or phone), you don't even need the human interface on the device. You can package the product into something as small as a postage stamp. It could be a camera, a network connection, a voice interface, a stand-alone or part of a system.

The point is, you may barely see it.

Technology is becoming invisible.