If you want to know what people are doing, ask them.

Ever since the collapse of ASIC design starts during the dramatic bursting of the Internet bubble, there has been frantic discussion within the engineering community about the intertwined fates of COT chip designs, ASICs and FPGAs. Adding to the drama, a new category — structured ASICs — emerged, appearing to offer a middle ground between cell-based designs and large FPGAs. And, much less ballyhooed but possibly more significant, complex application-directed standard-product ICs, variously known as platform ASICs, application-specific standard products or simply off-the-shelf ICs, surged as an alternative to the high design cost of ASICs and the high unit cost of FPGAs.

Vendors, naturally, vigorously seized the opportunity to claim that their product lines now included the perfect solutions for almost all design teams. But underneath the marketing barrage, design teams hunkered in their trenches to avoid the promotional shrapnel, the heavy fire of layoffs and cancellations, and the drifting gas cloud of dwindling design resources. They, too, posed the pivotal question: "How the heck are we going to implement this system with the resources we have left?"

The information source that designers and managers value most is the word of their peers. So the obvious way to help designers answer that question was to ask other designers.

EE Times, blessed with the unique favor of having direct access to nearly all the semiconductor design teams now working in the United States, decided to pose the question. This special section is the result.

In the pages that follow, we offer statistics on design teams at work in the United States today: their size, how they divide responsibilities and — critically, these days — their reliance on outsourcing. We look at the kinds of designs these teams are doing and at the volumes they expect to ship.

We also examine the design teams' implementation choices: what the teams considered, what they picked and how they reached those decisions.

And in an invited essay, iSuppli principal analyst Jordan Selburn offers insight into the future of the implementation decision.