In those early days of my career, hardware design was a real man’s game. We designed big boxes with loud fans that roared as if boasting of its impressiveness. Then came ASICs where all of sudden your innovation was miniaturized into something only an inch across. Today, chips are disappearing altogether and the real design work is in IP— making chips and systems are simply manufacturing steps.

The focus of an engineer today is either in creating IP, or assembling others IP into dream fulfilling subsystems. The power and influence of the engineer simply keeps expanding, being able to create larger and larger works from the work of others.

Design & Resuse 

This site should be helpful to people creating solutions requiring devices that interact with the internet.

The ability to turn a design drawing into a visualization that mimics reality is an invaluable tool for troubleshooting a design, convincing a nervous client or helping to promote a design firm’s capabilities. This segment of the CAD software industry continues to grow and evolve, with rendered visualizations becoming more sophisticated.

While this trend is indeed a positive one, it is fundamentally constrained by an exclusively designer-centric perspective. This view understandably stems from the historical hardware constraints which made customer/end user access to the CAD data prohibitively expensive. However, as can be seen in the high end, proprietary CAD/PLM offerings of Dassault, this tradeoff is not an inherent requirement. In a rhythmeering environment integration is needed for manufacturing, maintenance, supply chain, marketing analysis - throughout the complete product lifecycle. In order to achieve this level of deep integration, the underlying information models for CAD have to become features of the operating system and eventually the hardware. Open source platforms like Croquet point the way.

The new technique suggests that the nanotechnology factories of the future might not operate so differently from existing manufacturing plants.

“If you can take prototyping and nanomanufacturing to a level that leverages what engineers know how to do, then you are ahead of the game,” Clark said. “Most engineers with conventional training don’t think about nanoscale manipulation. But if you want to leverage a workforce that’s already in place, how do you set up the future of manufacturing in a language that engineers already use to communicate? That’s what we’re focused on doing here.”

Duke News: Automation of Nanotech Manufacturing May Be Ahead

This should prove to be very helpful because there’s no getting around the strange and often counter-intuitive aspects of the nanoscale realm where thermal and quantum fluctuations make moving molecules from place to place like walking in a hurricane. Similar to the proven patterns used in software virtual machines, the Duke researchers are abstracting out the unfamiliar/counter-intuitive and substituting the more familiar. This is yet another sign of dematerialization and virtualization so I expect it will bear fruit.

At some point I expect that Fed-Ex/Kinkos will probably throw their hat in the ring and some distributed manufacturing network startup with have a huge IPO. Perhaps more significantly, a new type of product or service that hasn’t been thought of yet will emerge(think Lotus 1-2-3 or Amazon). One source in the Design News article put the widespread use of direct digital manufacturing 20 years out but by then nanotechnology will have already started having a significant impact. Desktop manufacturing is being driven by exponentially growing factors it’s just always hard to see it in the early stages. I think Ray Kurzweil has it exactly right

Although technology grows in the exponential domain, we humans live in a linear world. So technological trends are not noticed as small levels of technological power are doubled. Then seemingly out of nowhere, a technology explodes into view. For example, when the Internet went from 20,000 to 80,000 nodes over a two year period during the 1980s, this progress remained hidden from the general public. A decade later, when it went from 20 million to 80 million nodes in the same amount of time, the impact was rather conspicuous.

Ray Kurzweil: The Law of Accelerating Returns