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I’ve spent much of my career as an engineer, including years in the semiconductor industry. And one lesson has stayed with me through every major technology shift: innovation always creates new complexity.
In semiconductors, we have seen that repeatedly. Every generation has delivered breakthroughs in performance and capability, but each step forward made it harder to understand system behavior. What used to be easy to validate on the component level with a test bench now needs a much wider view.
“The future of engineering will be defined by who can verify, understand, and improve complex systems fast enough to safely keep innovation moving forward,” says Ritu Favre, President of Emerson’s Test & Measurement business group. Emerson
Chiplet-based designs are a prime example. A chiplet from one supplier, an interposer from another, and a packaging process from a third may all perform perfectly on their own. Yet there is a chance for unexpected behavior when you put them together in a system. More and more often, the hardest engineering challenges are not in the individual components themselves. The problems are found when we start to combine components and have them interact with each other.
These challenges extend far beyond semiconductors. Products are becoming more software-defined and dependent on interactions across different technologies and environments. Think about the interactions needed for a modern car using adaptive cruise control on a bumpy road in a rainstorm. Or a passenger jet adjusting wing flaps and engine speeds in turbulent weather to maintain safety and stability. Both the car and the jet are being guided by complex computer systems with thousands of sensors leading to thousands of interactions every second. And in many cases, there are multiple computer systems working together. We are building systems of remarkable capability but understanding how they will act under real-world conditions is getting harder.
That is why I believe we are entering a new era of test. The defining challenge of modern engineering is no longer simply what we can design and build. It is what we can confidently verify.
Rethinking the Role of Test
In this new era, test can’t be an afterthought. For decades, test was treated as the final checkpoint before release. Design teams developed a product, test teams validated performance, and organizations looked for a final pass/fail to determine whether they were ready to move forward. That model worked fine when systems were more self-contained and predictable. Today, that approach can lead to more risk.
I believe we are entering a new era of test. The defining challenge of modern engineering is no longer simply what we can design and build. It is what we can confidently verify.
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