Rick Nelson

Fractal engineering vs. synergy
February 27, 2008

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.

Take electrical engineering, for example. It breaks down into application segments such as power, communications, consumer electronics, avionics, computers, software, telematics, and medical electronics. For each application area, you can subdivide further into integrated circuits, printed circuit boards, subassemblies, subsystems, and systems. Further, each discipline offers a choice of specialties focusing on R&D, validation, debug, characterization, production, and field installation and repair.

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 RTL-level designers, for example, to grasp all the complexities of the aerospace, medical, or automotive product 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 the March print issue of Test & Measurement World, I will report on a wall that arises between two test disciplines. Here’s Glenn Woppman, president and CEO of Asset InterTech, when commenting on his firm’s acquisition of International Test Technologies: “On 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 barriers 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 on www.tmworld.com: 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.” And here is Jack Erickson of Cadence Design Systems writing in EDN on power closure: it is “important to address this issue as early and as holistically as possible. The most efficient way is with a central specification of the power-implementation architecture that allows a single change to propagate across the flow. At the end of this exercise, you will have a good idea of the power consumption, timing feasibility, physical feasibility, and functional correctness.”

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 Editor in Chief. 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 in which I first got my start in technical journalism after leaving the engineering profession. Going forward, the respective EDN and TMW staffs will continue their 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.

Note: versions of this post will appear in upcoming print editions of EDN and Test & Measurement World.

Posted by Rick Nelson on February 27, 2008 | Comments (0)