The rise of Embedded Systems
Disclaimer:
The following are stricly my personal views and opinions.
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Embedded Systems is probably one of the most undervalued electronic engineering disciplines. For the uninitiated, Embedded Systems is the engineering associated with electronics design for any system large or small which has a processing element such as a Micro-Controller [uC] or Micro-Processor [uP]. Consumer Electronics such as Mobile Phones / Tablets only represent a small segment of ES. ES is everywhere, think remotes, AC's , Automobiles , Aircrafts to Nuclear power plants. Considering the abundance of ES you might think this might be a field in demand. The current answer , unfortunately is no. The reasons being, in no particular order of importance:
- Concentration of such skill only in certain companies
- Huge cost in terms of training a person with such a skill
- Availability and cost of tools to work on such
- Disconnect between academia and industry
- Lack of leaders in such a space
As a typical result of the above two things happen:
- Freshers are lapped up by the Certain companies in this area and trained to be ES engineers. These need not be good engineers and they did not intend to land up with this career. The pay for such engineers is also pretty meagre reflecting the confidence of their own companies in them. Quantity rules Quality.
- The Semiconductor and supporting companies are forced to develop tools which reduce the effort of the ES engineers. However these tools are not cheap! Hence Companies do not want to change loyalty for their tool for which they trained and paid Engineers for.
Both of the above contribute to the slow moving nature of the business. Compared to pure software, firmware [i.e. Code for ES] development times are on average 10x slower. Some part of ES is also mission critical meaning failure in such a system can cost lives. Hence validation of such systems is of paramount importance which slows the overall development time.
However , Times are changing!
There is huge demand in the ES space due to IoT, Electric Vehicles , Wearables to name a few. The traditional gatekeepers of ES technology cannot cope with this demand hence the domain is opening up to startups. Even internet biggies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft are in on this . For talented ES engineers, this opens up brand new opportunities, however there are a few prerequisites:
- You have to be good [obviously!]
- You cannot be tool dependant. Gone are those days.
- You work with FOSS, utilising the collective knowledge . [Beware of licensing terms though!]
- You are domain agnostic
- You are a super fast learner
India in particular will see a huge demand for such engineers in near future provided funding is made available to such startups. The internet startup waves are slowing down and the next stop is AI/ML . However all such startups cannot operate as a pure play Software , they will need a hardware to work on. Interestingly , in India , you cannot file a patent for a software , but you can do so for an ES. Startups also need to rethink their strategy on approaching problems as a pure software solution.
Hardware rules Software and so does ES rule pure-play software. All you need is a ground-braking application to showcase the power and stability . The demand and the pay is small currently but it is not going to remain so forever. The future belongs to IoT / embedded ML and thus the future belongs to Embedded Systems!
