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Death of the Hardware Engineer
A Dirge for the Digital Designer
Exactly two hundred years ago this June, Augustus De Morgan was born. Arguably, before that time, there were no logic designers in the world. For the next 200 years, however, logic designers steadily increased in number until today, when we walk the earth in six or seven digit numbers. In the big picture, however, the time for our species may be drawing to a close. Self-made storm clouds have been on the horizon for awhile now, the engineer-extincting meteors are headed for earth, and the distant dirge of death for the digital design profession as we know it grows ever-louder over the horizon.
Any engineering discipline done well should ultimately be self-eradicating. The key problems should be solved from the bottom up, and the creative genius of each generation should be absorbed into the collective tooling, IP, and best-practice methodologies of the next. Today, digital design bears little resemblance to what I learned in school twenty something years ago. For many of today's bright young engineers, DeMorgan equivalents are something they learned in an introductory logic design class, but not anything they apply in their day-to-day work.
They're much more likely to be worried about whether the Ethernet stack they are dropping into the software side of their system is compatible with the version of the MAC they bought from their silicon IP supplier, whether the layout will meet timing without some manual tweaking to the chip layout, and if electro migration will cause a reliability problem in their 90nm-based technology at the junction temperatures they're likely to be running.
The abstraction level of digital engineers' thinking has gone from transistor to subsystem over the course of four decades. Sure, there are people still optimizing the design of the common transistor today, but the vast majority of the engineering world takes their work for granted – including the biannual doubling of density and frequency.
Atop that transistorized foundation, a framework of ever-higher-level structures has been designed, refined, repeated, and commoditized so that future re-design is mostly unnecessary. While we engineers may be propelled by the "not invented here" syndrome to re-invent the wheel a few times, eventually we tire of the exercise and want to move on to the rest of the car.
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