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Copyright 2006 Techfocus Media, Inc. All rights reserved.FPGA
and Structured ASIC Journal
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 todays
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. Theyre 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 theyre 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
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Page 2
Copyright 2006 Techfocus Media, Inc. All rights reserved.FPGA
and Structured ASIC Journal
to the rest of the car.
In our case, the rest of the car has moved from gates to
multipliers to arithmetic logic units, and now to subsystems like
processors, memory, and I/O modules connected by standardized
plug-and-play interconnect fabrics. Once we conquer a level, we
rarely go back to visit except for occasional tuning. The result?
Our concerns have moved gradually from the core to the periphery,
and more and more often the thing were designing is an environment
in which software can encapsulate most of the true complexity of
our application. A growing number of electronic systems today
amount to design a high-performance computing system that fits in
this form factor, attaches to these peripherals, and burns this
much power.
Given the state of platform assembly tools, even today, the
complexity of that task is rapidly approaching zero. Ive sat
through a number of demonstrations where marketers, company
executives, and even supremely unqualified technical editors are
used to demonstrate that complex computing systems could be created
by relative neophytes in just a few minutes and with just a few
mouse clicks. Whats left for the real, trained hardware engineer to
do?
Clearly, our work here is not yet done. There are newer, faster
interfaces to invent, better busses to build, and more powerful
processors to pursue. However, the true frontiers of electronic
technology exploration are increasingly moving to where the
electronics touch the real world mechanical interfaces and where
the new complexity resides software. Think about one of todays
challenging system design problems hardware/software partitioning.
Why do we do this? Obviously anything that we can handle
effectively in software is best done that way. Whats left is what
we should put into hardware. Usually, that means functions for
which we cant get the desired performance in software. For many of
these, there are existing IP blocks that we can grab and plug. For
the diminishing number of functions that remain, we need to custom
design some hardware using ASIC, FPGA, or other implementation
technology, with hardware description languages like VHDL or
Verilog. This is the main domain of the endangered EE.
Now, we have new tools (that are somewhere between primitive and
semi-sophisticated) that will allow even these parts of many
designs to be created by a software engineer and then compiled into
custom hardware accelerators. Over time, these tools, combined with
improved programmable hardware fabrics like FPGAs, will allow
software engineers to take over many of these acceleration tasks.
The realm where true custom logic design is actually needed will be
rarified even more.
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Page 3
Copyright 2006 Techfocus Media, Inc. All rights reserved.FPGA
and Structured ASIC Journal
There are analogies to this type of revolution in many other
disciplines assembly programming is not dead. There are still a few
applications that require the bit- and- register-level discipline
that can be achieved only with such detailed coding, but the
mainstream has moved on to higher levels of abstraction. What is
happening today is that the majority of the functionality of any
embedded system is moving up the food chain to the software
engineer. Over the coming years, specialized digital hardware
design skills will be required less and less frequently. Well all
gradually follow in the footsteps of the one-hour photo lab.
So what are we to do? Should we hardware types all give up, turn
in our soldering irons, take Java classes online, and join the
unwashed masses of keyboard-bound pizza gobblers pounding out
programs for peanuts? (Oh man! I can hear that comments box filling
up already.) Is digital system designer joining the ranks of
typist, telegraph operator, keypunch technician, and countless
others in the Smithsonian Museum of Obsolete Occupations? Should we
lobby our governments for protection of the profession levying
taxes on software-based functionality that would make it more
attractive to implement new things in hardware? Do we set about
creating a subversive plan to upset the foundation moving to
three-state logic or attempting some other stunt that would
guarantee us all work for the next few decades re-inventing our
last centurys work?
Probably such drastic measures are not required. Our profession
will most likely evolve rather than die. As more of the digital
system design moves into software, more of the burden of designing
to power, form-factor, and interface standards will fall on a
single class of super-systems-engineers working with both hardware
and software concepts and supported by highly sophisticated tools
and technology. This new professional will not be the same software
developer that creates applications for desktop computers. This
person will also need a new type of education that our system does
not yet provide. This category of designer will be born in
industry, and will have their discipline later formalized into
academia. In fact, their forefathers are out there already -
creating the latest versions of consumer and industrial embedded
systems using newer, more advanced design techniques - pioneering
new methodologies for getting more complex designs to market
faster. Their creative breakthroughs will be tomorrows pedagogy. It
always works that way. Bright minds cannot help but find
challenging problems to solve.
by Kevin Morris, FPGA and Structured ASIC Journal April 18,
2006
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