Editorial

Capturing the Intellectual Assets of Human Beings Is a Good Thing, Right? Machines, electronic or otherwise, may be a mixed blessing, but it's human nature to create them. by Jonah McLeod

Gary Kasparov's recent defeat by Deep Blue, the chess supercomputer from IBM, showed that once again, engineers had managed to capture in a machine some of the reasoning that has long been held unique to human beings. It was yet another example of how computers are gradually gaining our knowledge and our "intellectual property."

The event brought back memories of Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. The novel gets its name from the piano rolls found in player pianos. Recorded on the rolls were the finger movements of great pianists, such as George Gershwin playing his composition "Rhapsody in Blue." In the novel, engineers manage the world. In this world, the engineers have captured all of the expertise once held by the skilled workers who ran factories, drove locomotives, and the like.

In recalling the story, I was struck by how much of this fiction described what has happened to modern man. Consider how much labor machines now do for us. Today, many "lights-out" factories run by a handful of workers turn out all manner of goods, not the least of which are semiconductors.

Indeed, one reason that it is relatively easy to enter the semiconductor industry for anyone with a billion dollars to invest is that much of the expertise in producing quality parts at high yields is embodied in the equipment. Ten years ago, that expertise resided within the mind of the process engineer.

Closer to the industry Integrated System Design serves, the creation of complex chips is possible only because of the incredible automation that has occurred in design tools. Twenty years ago, layout designers created ICs by placing rubylith tape on Mylar sheets to represent traces and transistors. Today, IC placement and routing are almost completely automated, and the skilled craftsmen that did hand layout are no longer practicing.

Likewise, front-end design has been automated by languages that describe circuit behavior and simulators that allow designers to evaluate the appropriateness of that behavior. Finally, logic synthesis tools convert the behavior into a gate-level netlist.

However, even this level of automation is insufficient to fill the million-gate ASICs the semiconductor industry can now build. As a result, existing designs are being reused rather than built from scratch. In a recent focus group I moderated, two groups of 10 designers were asked about their experience with design reuse. All said they had completed work containing reused design, some more successfully than others. These practices will become the norm as system company managers strive to shorten their time to market.

I started this piece lamenting the loss to a machine of yet another skill that was once held to be the sole domain of human beings. But the reality is that we are fated to do what we do: build machines to do our work for us.

At the conclusion of Player Piano , the disenfranchised workers revolt against the ruling engineers, destroying the machines that deprived them of their jobs. In the prophetic closing scene, the main character drives through the rubble of machines left by the revolution. In that rubble he finds the revolutionaries scavenging parts of destroyed machines to make machines of their own.

Jonah McLeod is the editor-in-chief of Integrated System Design.

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

integrated system design  July 1997