> Phones I can believe. (They have to be as tiny as possible, after all. And 
> battery performance is critical.) But other stuff? I'd be a little 
> surprised if, say, my LCD TV at home has any nonstandard components in it. 
> (Other than the LCD panel itself of course.)

What, you think Sony just happened to find the "Convert 60 Hz 1080p signal 
into 240 Hz" IC in the RS catalogue whilst their competitors couldn't?

> From what I understand, any device that has more than about three buttons 
> on it probably contains a microprocessor. (That includes my washing 
> machine, and my toaster.) But it'll be a Z80, straight off the shelf. Bolt 
> it in there with a standard low-voltage power supply and write some 
> firmware. No call for any custom ICs there.

That works fine for simple things, like the controller on your microwave or 
a keyboard, but anything that needs to deal with higher bandwidth or do more 
complex tasks in a special way would benefit from a custom IC.

> (Aren't ASICs prohibitively expensive to make anyway?)

Not if you're planning to use it high volume products.

> I'm no expect, but I would have thought an LCD driver is more an exercise 
> in analogue rather than digital electronics.

It's mostly digital, but then any high speed digital design becomes an 
exercise in analogue electronics when you have to start taking into account 
the capacitance and resistance of the tracks :-)

> It actually surprises me that somebody can make money just designing new 
> LCDs. To the untrained eye, they all appear to be identical, except for 
> size and resolution. Not sure why you'd ever need to design a new one...

In addition to size and resolution, in case you didn't notice the colour, 
viewing angle, brightness, power consumption and thickness has also been 
improving, and still is.  Hence new ones still need to be designed.

>> What about specialist electronic test equipment?
>
> This exists?

Just because some things are not sold doesn't mean they don't exist.  We 
have a lab full of stuff designed by us for only us to use.  The guy who I 
work with used to work in a department of Siemens specially dedicated to 
designing test equipment for internal use.  I would imagine most electronics 
design companies have departments like this.

> I was under the impression that a router is simply a board with an 
> off-the-shelf microprocessor, off-the-shelf RAM and a bunch of 
> off-the-shelf NIC driver chips.

So what happens when a new network standard comes along (eg 802.11n), 
someone needs to design an IC for that, and it's not just one company that 
designs an IC and everyone else buys it, there are loads of chipsets 
designed with slightly different characteristics.

And still the person who designs the *board* needs to be someone who has a 
deep understanding of all the ICs, even if they didn't design them 
themselves.  Board design isn't just a case of joining up the wires as it 
says on the datasheet.

>> What about the thousands of companies that offer FPGA and ASIC design 
>> services - who are they doing work for?  Who is working for them?
>
> It's news to me that anybody is in this line of work. I have no idea who 
> their clients would be.

Google "FPGA design service", I get 1.2 million results.

> Mmm, that's not bad...

Until you get some form of qualification though, you're going to fail at the 
first hurdle for most jobs.

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