Breaking up is hard to do - [electronics business]

Chip design has never been that easy, no matter how certain eras or process nodes might appear in retrospect. There has always been a tension between what physics could offer at any one time and what the tools, intellectual property (IP) and engineers could do to exploit it. If there is a way in which the challenges facing present-day semiconductor development differ from the past, it is in the level, breadth and thereby the complexity of the integration. A system-on-chip is a sensitive combination of different hardware blocks, processor cores interconnect and embedded software. Pulling all this together is, quite simply, horrible. The other thing you can be sure of on that list is that something has been missed out.