From where we're standing, it looks like there's lots going on in this world. The semiconductor industry is reveling in an enormous period of growth and expansion. Although many are betting that a cyclical downturn will be here by late 2002, for now the industry is absolutely booming.

Costly fabs are being built at a harried pace in numerous locations around the world, ramping up capacity to meet demand. Industry and academic research is pushing device geometries into the realm of the very or ultra-deep submicron - making .18 ým look easy and daring 0.15-ým, 0.13-ým, 0.07-ým processes to come out fighting. Metal layers are at sixes and sevens, while low-k dielectric research and advances in photolithography rush in, hoping to arrive on time. The 200-mm wafer is making way for the 300-mm monster at a faster pace than anyone would have predicted even a year ago.

On-chip integration in the tens of millions is shoving system-on-a-chip technology into reality's limelight. We're watching as the revolution in SOCs drives a ferocious market for wireless, high-performance, low-power, small form-factor devices.

Throw into the mix the shortage of engineers and an insatiable appetite for design-processing compute power, and the clamor to meet demand becomes deafening.

At the same time, frenetic time-to-market pressure is causing over-worked engineers to resort to a plethora of solutions to their challenges. The third-party Intellectual Property industry is burgeoning. Web-based design strategies - including web-accessed point tools, on-line design and consultation services, project and file management systems, remote collaboration, customer support, and an on-line commodity IP supply chain - are exploding across the market landscape. Compute and server farms are rapidly becoming a niche industry unto themselves.

EDA tool vendors are scrambling - and visibly struggling - to meet their customers' needs. Critics are, in fact, saying that the tools are broken, the algorithms unable to handle today's on-chip densities. Even harsher pundits say today's 'design gap' could have been predicted and prevented, given adequate forethought and planning. Meanwhile, in-house tools and CAD support from within the big semiconductor houses continue to pose the greatest competitive threat to the commercially available EDA tools. The customer 'buy or make' conundrum is constantly poised to tip toward the 'make' because the tool vendors have been unable to demonstrate a mastery of the interoperability, standards, and design-size capacity needed. Add to the fluid landscape the fact that design flows are being reworked or reinvented to migrate from ASICs to PLDs and FPGAs. And in the midst of all this, design verification continues to present the biggest nightmare of all.

Need we mention that the HDLs are badly in need of enhancement to higher levels of abstraction? Debates rage across the industry over candidates for system-level design language solutions; C and C++ have many advocates - and many flavors - and alternative high-level design languages are being proposed, as well, to provide the crucial combination of HDL-like constraints and the robustness of the higher-level languages.

In short, device physics, system-level integration technologies, IP reuse, consumer market pressures, and the huge economic engines which fuel the manufacturing infrastructure, are all experiencing turbulent growth and change.

And ... the situation is global and universal.

You would have to be an ostrich in the sand not to know that it's all linked in a complex, n-dimensional structure of technologies, economies, and cultures.

The world is shrinking, but the human dimension remains unchanged relative to the size of the planet it's housed on. We're still all people, getting up in the morning, throwing back the caffeine, and hunkering down over our terminals to throw our two-cents' worth of creativity and energy into this swirling sea of innovation and progress.

People are thinking and doing in the North, in the South, in the East, and the West - in all four corners of the earth - and ISD Magazine is listening in on the process. As part of our Europe 2000 special coverage, our editorial staff reports this month from the Alba Center in Scotland; in October, we'll be at IMEC in Belgium, while November will find us in France. In 2001, we'll be looking in on various locations across Asia and India, as well as expanding our horizons into what's hot in academia, here and abroad. Please join us in our journey.