Engineer in a Box?

Dr.Luke writes "Robert Lucky in a IEEE Spectrum Online article laments the state of today's engineering as progressively more removed from the "real" reality of tinkering and soldering "in a big musty laboratory" like Thomas Edison as engineers become more and more reliant on software tools and simulations. He fears that "math itself is slipping away into the wispy clouds of software that surround us" and that eventually engineers will be substituted by a bestselling software program Engineer-in-a-Box 2.0. What do you think?"

Comments

What do I think?

[Black Parrot]

I think it's a damn shame that we don't build everything by stacking up blocks of stone like our ancestors did.

Engineering is more difficult now

[tmark]

What this article neglects to recognize is that engineering things nowadays is vastle more difficult than engineering in the time of, say, Edison. You could engineer a lightbulb on the back of an envelope. Think you engineer a CPU like that ?

Re:As any good engineer knows...

[Usquebaugh]

A great engineer will have done this before and know what goes where and why. Testing should be confirmation of the design not fault finding.

I see this everyday where I work. The good engineers think they are breaking new ground and working all the hours to achieve this. The few experienced engineers go home at 5 and always hit their deadlines.

For most engineering endeavours it's all been done before. We turn out systems not inventions.

What are we building, anyway?

[John Miles]

Those can't be real transistors and wires down there, can they?

I never experienced that kind of dissonance until I accidentally barbecued an Athlon XP chip a few weeks ago. The chip package cracked open from thermal stress, and I broke it the rest of the way apart with my thumbnail. Inside, there was... nothing. Just a featureless, amorphous gray substrate that might have been a rock from my driveway. Maybe half a million violated transistors lay along that fault line, but my crime against Messrs. Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley left not a trace of evidence to be seen.

At some level I was already aware that IC fabrication processes had reached the point at which even the largest features would be entirely invisible to the naked eye. But I never appreciated it until looking inside that Athlon chip. I don't know what kind of '1337 t3ch they found at Area 51 when that UFO augered in, but I'll bet when they cracked it open, it looked just like the guts of an Athlon XP-1800 some idiot tried to run without a heatsink fan.