Electronic product design is bypassing electronics design, creating opportunity for non-EEs

Development platforms and pre-programmed devices are increasingly removing the need for most developers to deal with nitty-gritty hardware details. As a result, detailed, “bare-metal” digital design is becoming a niche specialty concentrated in the hands of vendors and design service houses. It may soon reach a tipping point where new product design teams need little to no hardware design expertise in-house.

Ever since the first days of microprocessor-based design, the push has been to abstract as many design details as possible. Programming has moved from assembly to C, increasingly complex operating systems and comprehensive software libraries have arisen, and microprocessors became microcontrollers, single-board computers, and systems-on-modules.

The forces driving this evolution are a combination of increasing device capability and shrinking development schedules. As processors became more powerful and complex, vendors realized that designers needed ever-more help figuring out how to get them to work. First reference designs, then development boards, and now complete hardware systems are an essential part of a processor vendor’s support offerings. At the same time, schedule pressures made “from-scratch” programming less effective and encouraged increasing development and use of libraries, first for drivers, then for protocol stacks, and now for complete subsystems.

A recent example of such abstraction comes from motor control specialist Trinamic. The company has long offered motor driver chips for developers to use in motion control designs. Now, they are offering chips with leading-edge motor control algorithms pre-programmed so that all developers need to do is tell the chip how they want the motor to move. The rest is done for them.

The IoT made cloud services and apps yet another layer of complexity with which designers needed help. There, processor vendors have gone from offering IoT building blocks to offering fully integrated platforms that include everything from edge hardware through cloud services to end-user application frameworks. Samsung’s ARTIK program, for instance, provides developers with a wireless module, cloud support, device management, app code, and, most recently, a scheme for monetizing IoT data, all pre-integrated. All the developer needs to do is define the device’s function, attach sensors and/or actuators to the wireless module, and decide what to do with the data. The rest of the implementation details are already done.

The practice of offering fully-designed and integrated hardware and software foundations has gone beyond the point where it is simply helping developers speed their design process, however. It is enabling the rise of a new developer class that does not need much design expertise at all. With fully-functioning hardware compute platforms like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi on the market, development teams can build highly capable systems while focusing almost exclusively on the application software.

Where hardware design expertise finally is required, such as when turning a prototype into a cost-optimized, manufacturable product, small teams of hardware experts can be hired. This “engineering as a service,” as my company’s vice president, Victor Gao, describes it, is becoming increasingly available, and not just from contract design houses. Companies whose main business is selling components, like distributors and silicon vendors such as VIA technologies, are offering engineering teams to their customers.

Things are getting to the point where all that is needed to create and bring to market an electronic product is an idea and high-level programming skills. The hardware implementation details can be handled with off-the-shelf purchases and services that a parts supplier or contract manufacturer will provide. This level of abstraction, in turn, is opening electronics development to a vast array of new creators, who may have little training as electronics engineers but have a deep understanding of problems they want to solve. Such development teams may soon outnumber conventional design teams in some markets, changing hardware design from a leading to a minor supporting role.