Where does the hardware end and the software begin?

Before integrated engineering process teams and system engineering concepts, hardware and software development groups often had walls between them. These walls were intellectual, emotional, departmental, and usually physical. Design a piece of hardware and throw it over the wall to the software group to program up. Now, in the days of immensely dense application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and flash memory, there is a tremendous blurring between hardware and software. In fact, there is an implied expectation that military and consumer devices can be reprogrammed (patches and upgrades) in the field - perhaps even wirelessly (e.g., the software radio, cell phones, MP3 players). In an integrated system design, the functional allocation of requirements may change even after deployment! The increase in processors' speed is competing with the (previously) advantageous speeds of hardware. Functions performed in software may become functions executed in hardware and vice versa. Analog circuits are being replaced by their digital equivalents. What are the impacts of this transition to reprogrammable devices? This presentation addresses these issues and more.