Editorial

Watch This Space As the role of design engineers evolves, so must the way magazines cover electronic design. by Lindsey Vereen

I don't know about you, but sometimes it seems that I've heard quite enough about reducing time to market. Shrinking product life cycles and increasing complexity also seem to wear out their welcome. On the other hand, these are some of the elements that make the electronics industry such an entertaining area to cover.

If you think about, it the rapid innovations in the electronic industry have to affect the magazines that cover electronic design. To begin with, a dynamic industry yields considerable fodder for journalists to chew on. But beyond that, if technologies and design methodologies change, magazines have to stay pretty quick on their metaphorical feet to chronicle them. For example, a magazine will cover design methodologies differently than it covers electronic components.

There is no question that design engineering is evolving. We function in an era in which the "tall, thin designer" has become dominant, according to Frank Ormerod, a Motorola design manager. He points out that because of increasing design complexity and shrinking technologies, the system designer can't throw a design over the wall to the circuit designer, and in turn the circuit designer can't throw the design over the wall to layout: in the world of the tall, thin designer, there is no one to throw the design over the wall to.

What that means, as Ken Rousseau, vice president of engineering at Cascade Design Automation (San Jose, CA), points out, is that the role of the system designer is expanding. More of the design responsibility is settling on the system designer's shoulders.

Since ASIC & EDA's audience is made up of such engineers, it's a good idea to keep tabs on the range of topics important to system designers. And to stay relevant, the magazine needs to evolve to keep up with their changing editorial needs. Consequently, we will be making a few minor alterations in the magazine in 1995. I'll address most of these adjustments in the next issue.

One tweak, however, has affected this issue. If I may direct your attention to the cover, you will see that the issue date is December 1994/January 1995. No, we are not becoming a bimonthly publication. In the past, for reasons too lengthy to go into here, we have distributed the magazine in the middle of the issue month (that means, for example, that you normally get the December issue in the middle of December).

In future we will be distributing the magazine in the month preceding the issue date. So a month from now you will receive your next issue. However, the issue date will be February 1995, rather than January 1995. Thereafter you will receive each issue in the month preceding the issue date. I guess you could say that in a sense, we are reducing our time-to-market.

Lindsey Vereen is editor-in-chief of ASIC & EDA, Technologies for System Design.

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please e-mail your message to michael@asic.com.