Tsugio Makimoto of Sony spoke at the recent Custom Integrated Circuits Conference in San Jose, California and made an interesting prediction. He suggested that robots would be the next big thing to drive the IC industry much as computers and consumer electronics have in the past. An EE Times story has more details on Makimoto's talk including a breakdown of the ICs used in the Sony AIBO robot. Makimoto gave a similar talk last year which you can find summarized on Sony's website.