Design and engineering aren't what they used to be, as EDN's audience well knows. Years ago, before processors and software ruled the world, designers would build up a circuit from relatively low-level building blocks, such as resistors, capacitors, small-scale ICs, transistors, and even vacuum tubes. They could configure a set of such components to provide functions that were defined primarily by final circuit topology; looking at the BOM (bill of materials), you would have only a hint concerning the design's final function.

Today's reality is that system-level ICs—whether we called them ASICs, ASSPs (application-specific standard products), SOCs (systems on a chip), or some other name—dominate in the circuit-versus-system debate. These ICs usually target a specific, carefully defined application, serve well in that application, and are ill-suited for almost anything else; graphics accelerator and 802.11 ICs are obvious examples. When you look at the product's BOM, the names of the key ICs give you a good idea of what the final system does. Although the design still contains plenty of passives and a few active, discrete devices, those devices no longer define circuit function; their role is to ensure that the IC can properly do its job with requisite bypassing or fill-in for functions that the designers could not integrate.

Reference 1 highlights the implications of this changed situation. It shows how nontraditional vendors are getting into the TV and multimedia business, because being a "vendor" now means specifying the required ICs and chip sets and then having an outsourced manufacturer buy them and put them on a pc board for you. The IC vendor handles the bulk of the detailed engineering work, supporting it with reference designs, application notes, and application-specific software and drivers. Most of the engineering design effort, therefore, concentrates not on design itself, but on making the prescribed design manufacturable at the right cost; integrating the enclosure, screen and keyboard, power supply, and other noncore portions of the product; and lining up vendors for the BOM.

No one knows the long-term implications of this change on the role of the design engineers. Will it cause them to lose sight of and comfort with low-level, design-related issues, which only a few practitioners will actually understand? Meanwhile, will the rest of them happily combine chip sets that were, in turn, designed by a handful of other engineers? Will the industry attract more software-only jockeys, for whom parameter passing and calling the RTOS define design life? Will it stop attracting engineers who know how to get into a design's dirty real-world details? Will design become a contradiction in terms for many who call themselves engineers? Will we need fewer "real" engineers?

Or, will engineers and their design challenge take on a new shape that we don't yet understand, as they concentrate on the struggle to get that final 5% of their product's design working reliably and ready for manufacture?

I don't know the answers, but I know what I'm going to do: build that four-transistor, software-free lightning detector I saw—the one that had no critical component values or layout constraints (Reference 2). It looks like pure engineering fun to me.

Contact me at bschweber@edn.com.