Quality check

Quality check
We applaud the handful of engineering managers who worked over the past two years to develop the IEEE International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), held in San Jose, Calif., late last month. At a time of tremendous pressure to meet time-to-money deadlines, the engineering community is well-served by a conference that takes a close look at this huge issue.

Wall Street and venture capitalists heavily reward those who get to market fast and clean up the details of their design later. That dynamic made Netscape one of the first Internet darlings and still plays a heavy role shaping the direction of startups and major corporations.

But the push for speed comes at a time of rising complexity on three fronts.

First, systems-on-chip have crossed the 10 million transistor mark. Meanwhile, both chip and systems businesses are less integrated than in the past, meaning any one product typically passes through the hands of multiple companies, each with a narrow focus on specifying, designing or manufacturing the product.

The final frontier of complexity is the growing interdependence among systems. In what ISQED speaker Gadi Singer called the networked world of the "global Internet machine," no one system is an island; each affects all the others. That sets up a reliability scenario that too few are tracking.

Engineers working in this environment need to step back to evaluate their methods and goals. ISQED has created a forum for doing just that. We hope it gets the attention and support from senior management that it deserves.

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I'd like to welcome two new members to the EE Times editorial family. Chuck Murray recently joined our staff as a senior news editor covering embedded systems in the automotive, industrial and medical industries. In addition, Linley Gwennap, former editor of the Microprocessor Report, is our new contributing editor for microprocessors. Look for the debut of Linley's monthly column, "In the Pipeline," in this issue.