This takes us to the dotcom bust of 2000- 2001, which was like the aerospace bust of 1969, in that it disproportionately affected technology workers (i.e., I eventually lost my job again). After peaking at 5132.52 on March 10, 2000 (the pinnacle of “irrational exuberance,” as Fed chairman Alan Greenspan once characterized the boom), NASDAQ, the techie index, collapsed three days later on March 13. On October 9, 2002, it struck its nadir: 1114.11.
NASDAQ’s highest value since that date (to mid-April of this year) was 4580, on October 31, 2007. That was the peak of the boom that started unraveling in early 2008 and whose low we probably haven’t yet seen. What will be the next transformational technology (or technologies), finding its start after the dotcom crash and growing through the present Great Recession? I wouldn’t be surprised if it has something to do with energy efficiency. Or, maybe it will involve the convergence of energy harvesting, thin-film batteries, and wireless mesh networks. It’s too soon to tell.
NOW WHAT?
What’s next in the longer term? Maybe I’m not the best person to ask. I was gazing at vacuum-tube filaments (and tweaking a regenerative-feedback knob!) while the IC was being launched. I made TV tapes to tell oscilloscope salesmen that microprocessors might be good for telling washing machines when to rinse. I wrote articles explaining how GPS could calibrate atomic clocks. True, I was a premature adopter of social networking, but Usenet and listservers do not equate to eBay and Twitter.
On the other hand, here we are in another of those episodes that find thousands of EEs trying to figure ways to get their resumes into the short stack and out of the tall stack. (Hint: it’s good to know Python; forget FORTRAN IV; calibrate the hiring manager before you bring up Forth.) Maybe I’ve learned something. Still, I’m not going to pick technologies. Yet it does make sense for engineers to look at how the electronics business has been changing recently to see how these shifts align with their skills.
Certain changes have been obvious. Chip production has been largely based in Asia for decades, starting even before Intel abandoned the memory business in the 1980s. One can argue whether that’s because of lax environmental laws there, or more willingness to invest in expensive fabs, or both. The original equipment manufacturer (OEM) center of mass has more recently shifted to Asia, in turn creating growth in smaller original design manufacturers (ODMs) to support them.
OEMs are like traditional car manufacturers. They make branded products for end users. ODMs are like auto parts suppliers. They make anonymous subassemblies. Or, the two are like primes and subcontractors in the aerospace business. Pick your industry. Either way, OEM/ODM engineering tends toward industrial design and manufacturing efficiency. But of more interest is where the gee-whiz parts of the design are carried out.
Over the years, I’ve watched semiconductor vendors make parts with better and better specs in a perpetual game of leapfrog. Yet recently, there’s been a change. In the past, the better the parts performed, the harder they were to use. The broader the amplifier bandwidth, for instance, the more difficult it was to keep it from oscillating in a circuit. The current OEMs and ODMs have changed that.
They will now (somewhat reluctantly) pay a few extra pennies for components that are less sensitive to layout. In fact, they would rather not deal with basic components. They respond much more positively when a chip vendor works with them to provide maybe not a “black” box, but some shade of “gray” box—one that performs a higher-level function at a higher level of performance than a “white” box made of off-the-shelf parts.
In essence, they’re “reverse-outsourcing” the most challenging parts of their designs to chip makers or independent design houses (IDHs), or a combination of the two. (Good IDHs seem to be prime acquisition targets for chip companies.) And where the IDHs are located doesn’t seem important.
When Analog Devices decided that microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) microphones were the coming thing, it acquired AudioAsics, a Copenhagen-based IDH that had a separate design center in Bratislava. There are other hot analog IDHs in Dublin and Edinburgh, and ADI has a strong captive operation in Limerick. Cork is a hotbed of DSP design. It all seems to depend on certain professors and the universities that support them. Think in terms of Fred Terman, at Stanford, updated and cloned dozens of times around the globe.
What might be the roots of the next stealth technology? We’re due for something transformational to come along and create the next Google or iPod. I certainly don’t know, but it’s easy to guess that it might have a greenish cast. And it’s not too farfetched to think it might be connected to consumer demand from a rising middle class in China and/or India. The trick might lie in thinking how those 21st century middle classes would be different than the 19th and 20th century middle classes in Europe and the Americas.
Cypress’ T.J. Rogers recently shared some interesting tidbits. I’m not claiming to know what T.J. thinks, but the notion I took away was that China is too big and culturally different to follow a Western pattern of growth, with interior cities linked by freeways and a seamless power and communications grid.
Instead, in the interior, think of separate, self-sufficient urban population centers with specialized manufacturing capabilities, self-powered by solar-thermal or pebble-bed nuclear plants and surrounded by agricultural resources. Then decide what you want to design for that kind of environment.