Engineering is a segmented profession. It divides into high-level disciplines—mechanical, electrical, civil, chemical, structural, automotive, aerospace, and so on. When you look closely at these high-level disciplines and begin to break them down, you find—fractal like—that you don’t make much headway in cutting down on the number of areas of engineering specialization available to you. Just as a fractal divides and repeatedly subdivides into components that appear to be as complex as the original, engineering disciplines divide and repeatedly subdivide into specialties of increasingly fine yet no less complex granularity.

It’s quite appropriate that this be the case. Engineering is much too complex for any practitioner to become proficient in more than a very narrow number of specialization areas, and it’s necessary to rely on teams made up of various specialists to cover all the facets necessary to get a product to market. Despite the emergence of electronic-system-level (ESL) design, it’s difficult for register-transfer-level (RTL) designers, for example, to grasp all the complexities of the aerospace, medical, or automotive products that the integrated circuits they are designing might ultimately populate.

Unfortunately, specialization often results in the formation of walls. The classic wall separates design and test, but even within test, walls arise that are counterproductive to cost-effective production of quality products. In this issue, I report on a wall that arises between two test disciplines (p. 16). Here’s Glenn Woppman, president and CEO of Asset InterTech, when commenting on his firm’s acquisition of International Test Technologies: “One thing we’ve found is another wall—hopefully not as high a wall—between structural test and functional test.”

What’s needed is a holistic approach toward our subject matter that can break down the walls between design and test and the various test subsets. And holistic approaches toward electrical engineering do exist. Here is Steve Wigley of the Semiconductor Test Consortium and LTX, writing at www.tmworld.com/guests: “the STIX initiative…dramatically increases the potential positive impact of the consortium on the semiconductor industry, by extending its influence beyond simply the tester architecture. It represents a more holistic approach to addressing the technical and economic issues that affect the entire global semiconductor test supply chain.”

The bottom line: Holistic is good, but even the best efforts of today bring together only the most closely related fractal components of the electrical-engineering profession. And that brings up why I’m writing this. I’ve been writing and reporting for Test & Measurement World for nearly 10 years, most recently serving as Chief Editor. I’ll be retaining that position while also taking on the responsibilities of EDN Editor in Chief. In that role, I’m rejoining the magazine at which I first got my start in technical journalism after leaving the engineering profession.

Going forward, the respective EDN and T&MW staffs will continue to focus on their specialties, but will also be concentrating on the synergetic intersections of their respective areas of expertise in an effort to bring you the information you need to succeed in this multifaceted world. As we move forward, I welcome your comments. Contact me at rnelson@reedbusiness.com.