6. Conclusion

Developments in integrated circuit design and manufacturing techniques now make it possible to build highly complex integrated systems. Various architectural alternatives based on compromises between "wired" and "programmed" logic enable us to strike a balance between the constraints of efficiency and flexibility: for the same architecture, it is the embedded software that enables (and will increasingly enable) us to customize and adapt the circuit to an application. ASIC designers "manipulated" transistors and cell libraries in the 1980s, function blocks in the 1990s; they are already assembling (and will increasingly be assembling) complex virtual components (which they will configure programmatically) over the next decade (figure 35 ). For essentially economic reasons, two techniques for building electronic...