Last month, Electronic Design brought together three of this industry’s foremost designers and most respected thinkers to participate in an informal panel discussion about the future of electronics engineering in America. The following is a summary of that informative, enlightening, entertaining, and sometimes profound conversation.
BARRIE GILBERT, an IEEE Life Fellow, holds more than 65 patents (including the well-known Gilbert cell), has authored numerous papers in JSSC and other journals, and is a contributor to, and editor of, several books. He joined Analog Devices, as its first Fellow in 1979. He is Director of the Northwest Labs, ADI’s first remote design center in Beaverton, Ore., developing a wide variety of IC products for the communications industry. For his work on merged logic–a precursor to I2L–he received the IEEE Outstanding Achievement Award (in 1970). For his contributions to nonlinear signal processing, he received the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Council Outstanding Development Award (in 1986). He was Oregon Researcher of the Year in 1990 and received the Solid-State Circuits Award in 1992, the ISSCC Outstanding Paper Award on five occasions, the Best Paper Award at ESSCIRC twice, and various awards for Best Product of the Year. In 1997, he received an Honorary Doctorate from Oregon State University.
TED HOFF (Marcian "Ted" Hoff), inventor of the microprocessor, has earned many honors during his long career. Currently the chief technologist of FTI Teklicon, Hoff was one of the first employees of Intel Corp. At the latter, he developed an architecture for a 4-bit CPU, with the help of engineers Stan Mazor and Federico Faggin. And so was born the first microprocessor, the 4004, which in effect launched the microelectronics era in November 1971. Hoff became the first Intel Fellow in 1980, the company's highest technical position. His numerous honors include induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the Stuart Ballantine Medal from the Franklin Institute. After receiving a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship to attend Stanford University. There he earned an MS and PhD, both in electrical engineering. Hoff stayed on to work at Stanford for another four years, conducting research on neural networks and integrated circuits.
BOB PEASE (Robert A. Pease), well-known as a champion of common-sense analog design, created the first adjustable negative regulator at National Semiconductor Corp. After graduating from MIT with a BSEE, he joined George A. Philbrick Researches. In a 14-year tenure there, he designed many leading-edge operational amplifiers, analog computing modules, and voltage-to-frequency converters. Since Pease arrived at NSC in 1976, he's designed several leading-edge analog ICs, including power regulators, voltage references, voltage-to-frequency converters, temperature sensors, and amplifiers. Currently staff scientist at National, Pease holds 21 patents. His definitive book on resolving analog design problems, Troubleshooting Analog Circuits, is in its sixteenth printing. Moreover, his column in Electronic Design, "Pease Porridge," received a Jesse H. Neal Certificate of Merit in 1992.
TED HOFF: I see three influences at work. Technology will continue to present very exciting challenges. In the semiconductor industry, Moore's Law has applied for a very long time, yet it looks like we still have some ways to go to continue to make things smaller. With today's technology, you can now carry the Encyclopedia Britannica in a package about the size of a postage stamp. However, we're getting pretty close to some of the limits, like noise problems, and those limits are likely to become a problem, so one of the issues is how long this will take. Current estimates seem to be running in the order of 10 to 20 years, and maybe another order of magnitude reduction in size. In fact, as we approach these limits, the rate of shrinking is probably going to slow down and become more asymptotic.
Further, when you look at the speeds at which digital circuits are running today, it raises questions about the analog world. Can we do some interesting things like radar and so on with integrated circuits? Who's using it to improve, let's say, automobile safety or other things of that type? The challenges are there just waiting to be answered.
One of the other major influences is outsourcing. It's one thing to outsource certain aspects of engineering and design to try to remain competitive. But I'm concerned that if we ship the whole package to other parts of the world, we're going to essentially facilitate a reduction in our own standard of living. If another nation has all the pieces in place and its people are willing to work very hard and tolerate a much lower standard of living than we have, we're basically setting up our own competition.
In California where I live and work, we've had a unique set of conditions with venture capital, with some fantastic universities, and with a kind of entrepreneurial spirit and policy that companies have had to really get their employees involved in the ownership of the company through stock options, plans, and other programs. As a result, there's been a high degree of motivation as well as a set of conditions that have been ideal for the development of new companies and of people who are encouraged to foster new ideas.
Along those same lines, it seems like there are a number of programs in this country that, if anything, are trying to discourage this concept of ownership. In other words, the emphasis is on finding new ways to tax stock options or to discourage them, like causing companies to take a negative reporting on their balance sheets if they issue them. All of these things would seem to discourage the concept of granting employees ownership in their companies and which, I believe, is a major motivating factor in getting people to be willing to take that extra bit of effort to make their companies successful.
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