Falling IC development productivity means lost engineering jobs

By EETimes

December 2, 2010

Bad news: Steadily declining IC development productivity means more job losses for engineers employed in first-world economies—e.g. U.S. and Europe. Those lost jobs are going to second-world economies because labor costs are much lower. Moreover, the trend is accelerating as chip design complexity outpaces gains in productivity. Don’t shoot the messenger for the message.

IC development productivity isn’t keeping pace with rising design complexity. The solution has been to increase team size—throw more resources at projects. Once that decision is made, the question quickly turns to choosing the geographical location to hire the new resources? Second-world economies that have a good base of technical professionals seem to be the logical choice, at least from the perspective of executive management.

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