[nasional_list] [ppiindia] Electrical Engineering's identity crisis
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- To: apakabar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, ppiindia@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Niken Franks <nikenfranks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, agoff@xxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 18 Feb 2005 10:38:30 +0000 (GMT)
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(IEEE Spectrum)
Electrical Engineering's Identity Crisis
When does a vast and vital profession become
unrecognizably diffuse?
By Paul Wallich
MORE THAN A CENTURY AGO, electrical engineering was
so much simpler. Basically, it referred to the
technical end of telegraphy, trolley cars, or electric
power. Nevertheless, here and there members of that
fledgling profession were quietly setting the stage
for an era in industrial history unparalleled for its
innovation, growth, and complexity.
That decades-long saga was punctuated early on by
spark-gap radios, tubes, and amplifiers. With World
War II came radar, sonar, and the proximity fuze,
followed by electronic computation. Then came
solid-state transistors and integrated circuits:
originally with a few transistors, lately with
hundreds of millions. Oil-filled circuit breakers the
size of a cottage eventually gave way to solid-state
switches the size of a fist. From programs on punch
cards, computer scientists progressed to programs that
write programs that write programs, all stored on
magnetic disks whose capacity has doubled every 15
months for the past 20 years [see "Through a Glass"].
In two or three generations, engineers took us from
shouting into a hand-cranked box attached to a wall to
swapping video clips over a device that fits in a
shirt pocket.
Today, at its fringes, electrical engineering is
blending with biology to establish such disciplines as
biomedical engineering, bioinformatics, and even odd,
nameless fields in which, for example, researchers are
interfacing the human nervous system with electronic
systems or striving to use bacteria to make electronic
devices. On another frontier?one of many?EEs are
joining forces with quantum physicists and materials
scientists to establish entirely new branches of
electronics based on the quantum mechanical property
of spin, rather than the electromagnetic property of
charge.
What EEs have accomplished is amazing by any standard.
"Electrical engineers rule the world!" exclaims David
Liddle, a partner in U.S. Venture Partners, a venture
capital firm in Menlo Park, Calif. "Who's been more
important? Who's made more of a difference?"
But as the purview of electrical engineering expands,
does the entire discipline risk a kind of effacement
by diffusion, like a photograph that has been enlarged
so much that its subject is no longer recognizable?
For those in the profession, and those at universities
who teach its future practitioners, this is not an
abstract issue. It calls into question the very
essence of what it means to be an EE.
"I REMEMBER HEARING the same sort of words 20 years
ago," says Fawwaz T. Ulaby, professor of electrical
engineering and computer science and vice president
for research at the University of Michigan, in Ann
Arbor. Indeed, two decades ago, in its 20th
anniversary issue, IEEE Spectrum ran an article
describing how the drive toward abstraction and
computer simulation was reshaping electrical
engineering [see "The Engineer's Job: It Moves Toward
Abstraction," Spectrum, June 1984]. Breadboards and
soldering irons were out; computer simulations and
other abstractions were in.
If anything, the variety of things EEs do has actually
increased since then. If you are an EE, you might
design distribution substations for an electric
utility or procure mobile communications systems for a
package delivery company or plan the upgrade of
sprawling computer infrastructures for a government
agency. You might be a project manager who directs the
work of others. You might review patents for an
intellectual property firm, or analyze signal strength
patterns in the coverage areas of a cellphone company.
You might preside over a company as CEO, teach
undergraduates at a university, or work at a venture
capital or patent law firm.
Maybe you work on contract software in India, green
laser diodes in Japan, or inertial guidance systems in
Russia. Maybe, just maybe, you design digital or?more
and more improbably?analog circuits for a living. Then
there are the offshoots: field engineering, sales
engineering, test engineering. Lots of folks in those
fields consider themselves EEs, too. And why not? As
William A. Wulf, president of the National Academy of
Engineering (NAE), in Washington, D.C., notes, the
boundaries between disciplines are a matter of human
convenience, not natural law.
If your aim is to define the essence of the electrical
engineering profession, you might ask what all these
people have in common. Perhaps what links them is the
connection, however indirect, between their
livelihoods and the motion of electrons (or photons).
But is such a link essential to defining an EE? Not to
Ulaby.
"Engineers tend to be adaptive machines," he says.
Even though there's little resemblance between the
details of what he learned in school and the work he
does now, Ulaby, who is also editor of the Proceedings
of the IEEE, has no doubt that he himself is an EE.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Engineers are doing less and less design of circuits
and getting further from the MESSINESS?and
SATISFACTIONS?of the real world
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David A. Mindell of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, in Cambridge, says the perception that the
field is heading toward unrecognizability is a
constant. (This associate professor of the history of
engineering and manufacturing also designs electronic
subsystems for underwater vehicles.) Perhaps the
biggest change to the electrical engineering field
occurred in 1963, when engineers who worked with
generators and transmission lines and engineers who
worked with tubes and transistors finally agreed that
they were all part of the same discipline.
That was the year the American Institute of Electrical
Engineers (AIEE), whose membership consisted largely
of power engineers, agreed to merge with the Institute
of Radio Engineers (IRE) to form the IEEE. In the
1980s, jokers were already suggesting that the IEEE
should become the Institute of Electrical Engineers
and Everyone Else. Then, as now, many observers
worried that such mainstay specialties of the
profession as power engineering and analog circuit
design were stagnating, while all of the interesting
progress took place at the boundaries between
electrical engineering and other fields.
FORCED TO CHOOSE a single core activity of electrical
engineering, many technologists would probably pick
circuit design, in all its various manifestations. It
wouldn't be anything like a unanimous choice, of
course, but it would make sense in much the same way
as identifying surgery as the archetype of the medical
profession, say, or litigation as the heart of
lawyers' work. Circuit design is, after all, what
non-EEs tend to associate with electrical engineering,
if only in a vague way. And if a connection to moving
electrons is a fundamental characteristic of an EE's
occupation, then circuit designers must be counted
among the elite.
By that standard, Tom Riordan is an EE's EE. Now a
vice president and general manager of the
microprocessor division at chip conglomerate
PMC-Sierra Inc., in Santa Clara, Calif., Riordan
started his career in the late 1970s, when circuit
design was king and designing your own microprocessor,
he says, "was the be-all and end-all" of an electrical
engineering career. Riordan helped design a
single-chip signal processor at Intel Corp. and
created special-purpose arithmetic units at Weitek
Corp. He then played a key role in developing the
design for the central processing unit of the
single-chip reduced instruction set computer (RISC)
that made what was then MIPS Computer Systems Inc. a
commercial success in the early 1990s.
That kind of deeply technical 14- to 16-hour-a-day
work, mixing intimate knowledge of architectural
principles with the intricacies of semiconductor
layout required to get a chip working at speed, is
what Riordan still thinks of as engineering. He
designed a floating-point unit for MIPS and oversaw
the architecture of a couple of more generations of
CPUs before starting his own company, Quantum Effect
Devices Inc., where he guided about a dozen engineers
over the hurdles of creating MIPS-compatible custom
processors. On the side, he negotiated with customers
and dealt with investors and investment bankers.
After PMC-Sierra bought Quantum in 2000, Riordan
dropped much of the CEO side of his job. This shift,
he says, gives him roughly one day a week of what he
calls "real engineering"?helping to make complex
tradeoffs in CPU architecture or reviewing the
niceties of yet another reduction in the size of a
chip feature. He may not get into the same level of
technical detail on every project as he once did, but
he asserts that knowing the ins and outs of
nanometer-scale circuit design is still part of his
job.
OF COURSE, the definition of hands-on has changed
drastically in the past 20 or 30 years. Designers in
the 1970s and 1980s still built prototypes out of
parts they could see with the naked eye. And when
those prototypes didn't work, they attached
oscilloscope probes to suspect points until they found
the source of the problem. Those days are fast
becoming a fond memory.
For the past 10 or 15 years, at least, "you couldn't
debug a system into working," says John Mashey, a
former chief scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., in
Mountain View, Calif. When you're building on silicon,
the first chip out of production has to "more or less
work," he adds, maybe not at the full speed or with
all the functions intended. But if the chip doesn't do
most of what it was designed to do, a project will
lose months getting to market while waiting for a new
fabrication cycle. So design now means endless rounds
of simulation and modeling. And design engineers
effectively become programmers as they type the
"source code" representing their circuits into the
tools that will ultimately generate a layout.
Where designers once built, breadboarded, poked, and
probed, they now simulate. And almost all of the
modeling, analysis, and synthesis that designers do,
Riordan points out, would be unthinkable without the
nearly two orders of magnitude by which computing
power has increased in the past decade.
As Moore's Law continues its relentless advance,
engineers who build systems?whether chips or
boards?seem to be doing less and less actual design of
circuits and ever more assembly of prepackaged
components. Circuit designers are working with bigger
and bigger functional blocks, assembling them with
increasingly powerful tools, and getting further from
both the messiness and the simple satisfactions of
working in the real world.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
COLD WARRIOR: In 1960, an electrical engineer at a
Radio Free Europe transmitting station in Munich,
Germany, analyzed broadcast signals. The work was part
of these stations' constant struggle to be heard over
Soviet-bloc jamming efforts, which cost an estimated
US $35 million?roughly double the cost of running the
stations.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mashey points out that for a system on a chip, or SOC,
designers don't even lay out blocks of circuitry.
Instead they stitch together CPU blocks, network and
video interfaces, cache memory, and other pieces of
intellectual property from multiple vendors?each with
software instructions that handle the detailed
interconnections?to create a custom chip for a set-top
box, a toy, or a smart refrigerator. Designers may put
together complex systems containing billions of
transistors without ever seeing a physical circuit; to
the designer, the chip or populated circuit board is
merely a collection of files stored on a desktop
computer.
Although such an abstract, project management-style
view of engineering may be what the future holds, it
could well leave current generations of engineers
behind. Some technologists have always embraced
management; others (such as Riordan) have taken on
management tasks only reluctantly. If managing becomes
what engineers do, might a very different kind of
person make up most of the engineering population? The
NAE's Wulf doesn't think so: he politely scolds his
interviewer for parroting the old stereotype of
engineers as gizmo-focused loners. As long as
engineering involves using technology to make new
things, he argues, that's what engineering types will
do, even if it involves work that looks like a
combination of anthropology, marketing, and project
management.
SOME ENGINEERING SCHOOLS and departments have been
bowing to these trends for years. Rosalind H.
Williams, director of the MIT Program in Science,
Technology, and Society, helped oversee the
institution's curriculum retooling in the second half
of the 1990s. She suggests that assembling parts from
disparate sources and cobbling together abstractions
makes engineering more akin to project management than
to design. Some of the changes in MIT's curriculum
were designed to prepare engineering students for
management-related careers. Others, like the addition
of biology to the core curriculum, respond to changes
in the world where students will live and work.
Already, she says, many of the roughly one-third of
MIT students who major in electrical engineering and
computer science, or EECS, view it as a sort of
technical liberal arts degree that prepares them for a
wide range of technical and nontechnical jobs. Indeed,
after earning their undergraduate degrees, about a
quarter of MIT students go directly into jobs in
finance or management consulting.
One crucial problem, Michigan's Ulaby says, is giving
students a sense of the potential breadth of their
field without sacrificing solid training in its
fundamentals. It takes time for students to absorb the
mathematical rigor associated with the material, he
says. With demand for both a broad perspective and a
rigorous grounding in an ever-enlarging set of core
subjects, it is not surprising that the four-year
engineering degree is under pressure, as it has been
for decades. Wulf, for example, states flatly that the
four-year engineering degree should not suffice as a
first professional qualification. A. Richard Newton,
dean of the College of Engineering at the University
of California, Berkeley, proposes that students take a
fifth year tackling real-world problems far from home
to improve their practical and cultural understanding
of their discipline's role in society.
EVEN AS SOME SCHOOLS and engineers embrace generalist
status, others must specialize. Why? Simple: who
creates those neatly packaged abstractions that
project managers assemble into finished systems at the
click of a mouse? Other EEs, of course, working as
module designers and programmers. These engineers must
focus on the minutiae of a particular
subdiscipline?say, the timing characteristics of a
particular family of CMOS chip-fabrication processes
or the design of a special class of databases. Then
comes the hard part: packaging their knowledge in a
form that nonspecialists can use without worrying
about all the details.
Ironically, as the visible face of circuits becomes
more and more digital, their analog foundation becomes
more and more apparent. As circuit features shrink
below 100 nanometers, the quaint design-rule
abstractions that allowed engineers for the most part
to leave aside leakage current, parasitic capacitance,
and other messy real-world issues no longer hold, says
Riordan. Anyone who designs systems that operate at
high speed and low power in this nano domain must know
quantum field theory and solid-state physics as well
as algorithms. And module builders have to work harder
to maintain the digital behavior.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HAVING A BLAST: During the glory days of heavy
electrical equipment design, almost half a century
ago, a General Electric engineer perched in a hanging
chair as he adjusted aluminum spheres for a
high-voltage test. The simulated lightning strike was
carried out on a new 100 000-kilovolt-ampere
transformer at GE's mammoth facility in Pittsfield,
Mass.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Such difficulties point to the downside of the
entrenched reliance on packages, encapsulated
expertise, and abstraction. Many observers have begun
to worry that EEs reared on abstraction and on
computer simulations that simply parrot abstract
models may lose touch with the behavior of real
devices. Fred G. Martin, a longtime MIT Media
Laboratory researcher who is now an assistant
professor at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell,
tells a story of just how brittle abstract knowledge
can be. One of his students complained about Martin's
lecture on transistors, fixated on a rule he had
learned in a previous course, namely that collector
current equals base current multiplied by gain.
As many EEs have discovered, at some point this rule
is trumped by Ohm's Law, which tells you how much
current flows through a circuit with a given
resistance and input voltage. But the student, who had
never built a real, working circuit, was ready to
believe that Martin's discussion of Ohm's Law was
wrong because it conflicted with the shorthand rule
he'd been taught about idealized transistors. A
working EE would never make such a simple error.
Bert Sutherland, who retired in 2000 as director of
Sun Microsystems Laboratory after a career that also
included stints managing researchers at Xerox Palo
Alto Research Center, expresses another concern about
where the increasing reliance on modeling and
simulation may be taking engineers. Sure, Sutherland
says, growing computer power makes it easier to model
phenomena that are already easy to model, but "things
that are difficult to model stay difficult."
As the tools themselves become more complex, the
temptation to avoid approaches that aren't amenable to
existing software may increase. Techniques such as
asynchronous logic or adiabatic clock distribution (in
which resonant circuits recapture much of the energy
usually dissipated in sending clock pulses across a
chip) offer significant improvements in performance or
power consumption, for example, but the chips are much
harder to analyze than ones in which the gates are
synchronized and all of a clock network's energy is
dissipated to ground.
The same advances that led EEs to build more complex
systems also allow smaller teams?maybe even a single
engineer?to handle projects that in previous decades
would have called for a hangar full of men with slide
rules, pocket protectors, and narrow ties. This
increase in productivity poses a conundrum, says
Sutherland: you have to hope that the number of
projects calling for engineering talent outpaces the
rate at which EEs encapsulate and standardize their
knowledge, making fewer of them necessary for any
given project.
MIT's Williams points to the long-term decline in U.S.
students choosing engineering as a sign that young
people do not see it as a secure, comfortable career
[see sidebar, "Stay Current, Stay Lucky, Stay
Employed"]. Between 1987 and 2001, the U.S. Department
of Education reports, the number of electrical
engineering bachelor's degrees in the United States
decreased by more than 45 percent.
With EE enrollment, employment, and subject matter all
in upheaval, companies and educational institutions
will have to make significant adjustments. Some of
them may prosper beyond expectations; others will not
survive.
Wulf is optimistic: he points to the rapid revamping
of curricula shortly after World War II, when EEs
built a science-based educational system that
effectively reclaimed their field from the physicists,
who had made so many key technological advances during
the war. Wulf also thinks that knowing something about
electrical engineering can benefit people in other
disciplines. For example, he says, a civil engineer
should know enough about digital design to be able to
specify how a bucketload of radio-frequency-enabled
strain gauges can be installed in a bridge to let the
structure diagnose itself.
For the EEs who keep up with the pace of innovation,
the ride ahead will be thrilling. Quantum-based
cryptographic devices are already reaching market, and
their computing progeny?which in theory could
simultaneously calculate all possible answers to some
questions?are inching into existence in laboratories
around the globe. On the biology side, EEs like Tom
Knight, senior research scientist at the MIT
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, are applying
principles that worked for chip-design rules and the
very large-scale integration (VLSI) revolution to
create stripped-down microorganisms that could be bred
to lay down patterns for ultrasmall circuits made of
silicon, or whatever material comes next.
Indeed, biology will reshape electrical engineering in
ways we can't imagine. Neural networks, genetic
programming, computer viruses?each of these took
inspiration from biological phenomena, points out
Kenneth R. Foster, a professor of bioengineering at
the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia.
"During the span of my own career, a new discipline,
bioengineering, emerged from electrical engineering
and other classical engineering fields and has taken
off in the directions of tissue engineering, genetics,
proteomics, and neuroscience," he says. What Foster
refers to as "the spectacular science in these fields"
will reshape the way that electrical engineering is
practiced. For example, EEs are borrowing techniques
from the world of molecular biology to assemble
structures that can be used as displays or switches,
and to simulate neurons.
"We are using VLSI chips to simulate the action of
neurons and other biological cells," explains Foster's
colleague Kwabena Boahen, an associate professor in
the Penn bioengineering department. Boahen points out
that a basic analog circuit-design modeling program
such as Spice can simulate neurons "just fine."
More EEs are getting involved with neurobiology,
Boahen notes, and biologists are happy to work with
them. "The biologists determine what the inner
workings of a neuron are," he explains. "They tell
what the pieces are, and I'll design a circuit to
mimic how these pieces work together." Boahen himself
is a prime example of an EE who migrated to biology.
He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical
and computer engineering and a doctorate in
computation and neural systems.
So in such a complex new industrial and educational
ecology, how will we recognize EEs? By their stance,
Riordan says: feet squarely planted on terra firma,
but with a gaze out toward the horizon. Musing about
why he became an EE, he cheerfully concedes that he
didn't crave pure intellectual exploration, as the
best scientists do. Nor did he have whatever turn of
brain it takes to make fine art. What he had then, and
has now, is "the specific ability to deal with the
real world as it exists and craft things from it."
Others with similar talents will find in electrical
engineering a heady lifelong stimulus. Riordan
concludes, "I can't think of a more fortunate path
than the one I followed."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PAUL WALLICH is a science writer who lives in
Montpelier, Vt.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TO PROBE FURTHER:
Two histories of electrical engineering were published
by the IEEE Press in 1984. One of the books, Engineers
& Electrons, by John D. Ryder and Donald G. Fink, was
a breezy overview aimed at a broad readership. The
other, The Making of a Profession: A Century of
Electrical Engineering in America, was a more
scholarly volume written by A. Michal McMahon.
Rosalind H. Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology incorporated personal reminiscences and
family history into her book Retooling: A Historian
Confronts Technological Change (MIT Press, 2002).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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