Keith Devens .com

Entry 1543

Embedded.com: The Death of Hardware Engineering.

I've noticed over the last few years that hardware design seems to parallel software design, just delayed by about a decade. All the virtues and vices that programmers discovered in the '80s are now being uncovered by hardware engineers. High-level languages? What a good idea-for hardware. Compilers? Gee, you mean we don't have to hand-craft every single transistor? Object-oriented programming? The hardware guys are just now catching on.

The hardware-design profession is pulling itself through the same knothole that programmers did 10 years ago. Just as assembly code gave way to higher-level languages, hardware engineers are gradually discovering the joys of high-level abstraction. The benefits are much the same, but so are the pitfalls and the battles. When compiled languages first started to catch on, the "old guard" decried them as a lazy, inefficient, and unprofessional way to write software. Compilers were labeled as inelegant, generating bulky, slow, spaghetti code. "Real programmers toggle front-panel switches."

Old-timers complained that compiled code could never be as fast, tight, or elegant as hand-written assembly code-and they were absolutely right. But it didn't matter. For all the failings and shortcomings of compilers over human assembly programmers, they are more efficient in the one dimension that matters: programmers' time. ... It's not an efficient use of the engineers' time to design a chip [with 10 million gates], gate by carefully crafted gate. Some faster and more productive method is required.

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05:00 (utc-5)
edited: 05:02 (utc-5)