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A macro look at the micro world
  lobalization is not a new phenomenon. As public-policy expert Henry Rowen explained to editor-in-chief Brian Fuller, ever since Henry Ford started mass-producing cars, businesses have sought to shave costs whenever and wherever they could. But operations can be globalized far more efficiently today than in the past. Two reasons: the Internet, with its instant communications, and time-to-market pressures, which force companies to search for talent anywhere they can find it to get the job done.
Offshoring is a bone of contention in the industry that has spilled over into the political arena in this election year, reports editor-at-large Rick Merritt. At least 45 state and 13 federal bills on offshoring are pending.
Europe is also wrestling with globalization's long-term implications. Junko Yoshida reports that the European Commission has no strategy yet for bringing manufacturing back to the continent.
 But for many companies and their employees, globalization is an irreversible trend. Mike Clendenin profiles Mike Yu, who left China in 1990 and now logs many air miles between that country and the States to attend to his R&D activity at Beijing-based Vimicro, his family in New Jersey and clients all over the globe.
K.C. Krishnadas reports that many expatriate Indian engineers are similarly returning to the subcontinent after earning their stripes at jobs overseas, mostly the United States.
Senior editors Richard Goering and Ron Wilson gauge globalization's effect on design as offshoring comes to that field.
R&D has long been migrating offshore, says editorial director Richard Wallace, particularly as the balance between research and development shifts to the "d" side. The head of IBM's China Development Lab says that IBM scouts talent around the world.
As our online survey on globalization found, the only constant is change.
— Nic Mokhoff
Editor, Special Features
Informing the Debate
Political winds hit offshoring
The most recent twist in the 40-year saga of globalization in electronics-offshoring skilled technology jobs-has become a political hot potato in the upcoming presidential election and a gut-level worry for engineers in the trenches.
by Rick Merritt
Why Network Appliance put a design team in Bangalore
At the bottom of the downturn, Network Appliance Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) did what many Silicon Valley companies had been doing.
by Rick Merritt
Remote design centers have growing gains
Water always flows to lower levels, but uncontrolled flows cause floods and devastation.
by Gopal K Garg
Europe unsure of future path
The electronics industry's diminishing investment in European manufacturing and R&D activities in favor of Asian sites is a hot-button issue on the continent for political leaders in national governments and bureaucrats at the European Commission, as well as for industry executives and workers.
by Junko Yoshida
Scotland keeps stiff upper lip as jobs depart
No other region in Europe has experienced a roller-coaster ride quite like the one Scotland has taken, courtesy of the global electronics industry.
by Junko Yoshida, with Peter Clarke
Asia Connection
A mobile modern 'Marco Polo'
Mike Yu left China in 1990 to study in the United States and returned in 2001 to work at Beijing-based Vimicro, a maker of imaging chips.
by Mike Clendenin
Indian engineers repatriate
It's not true that you can't go home again, as author Thomas Wolfe once wrote. Indian expatriate engineers are proving, in droves, that you can go home again.
by K.C. Krishnadas
Global Design
Gold rush days for global design?
Werner Goertz, vice president of business development for the VLSI division of international outsourcing giant Wipro, described the scene on the street in Bangalore, India, ground zero for the design outsourcing mania: "It's like a gold rush town here. You can't get a hotel room.
by Ron Wilson
Design tools 'Made not in USA'
The EDA industry consists primarily of U.S. companies, but the software they sell wasn't necessarily developed here.
by Richard Goering
Historical View
A lesson from history
Henry Rowen has been around the block a few times. A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, he is a professor of public policy and management emeritus at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and a member of Stanford's Asia/Pacific Research Center.
by Brian Fuller
R&D follows talent worldwide
Looked at through the lens of out-sourcing, globalization comes into focus as a brutal war of job attrition that is hollowing out America's high-technology core.
by Richard Wallace
What They Think
Offshoring has hit home
The results are in for a new EE Times survey that was commissioned to take the pulse of engineers on offshoring and job security.
by Brian Fuller
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