OTHER PEOPLE'S KNOWLEDGE

I was visiting a high-tech company whose principal business was advanced chip design. A young engineer showed me his latest prototype. It was a circuit board dominated by a single large integrated circuit. It contained, he told me, more than 2 billion transistors. I'd never done anything remotely similar myself, and I wondered how I'd feel as a new engineer in some company being given a Mission: Impossible assignment like that. How can you possibly design something so complex? I asked. The young engineer just shrugged his shoulders. No big deal, he appeared to be saying. After a little further prodding, he confessed that, after all, there was a large collection of previously designed cells, and the computer design tools were pretty awesome. Not much to it, really. Technology has gotten exponentially more complex with the passing years, and yet engineers are turned out of universities in the same four-year cycle that they used decades ago. How is this possible? © 2012 IEEE.