Taken to Task

You do not need to go back many years to find a time when the job title “software engineer” within the electronics industry was unheard of. Instead, it was the responsibility of the electronics design engineer to undertake all aspects of a design.
This would include the circuit design and capture, PCB artwork, component selection and analysis, requirements capture, and soon it was also their responsibility to design, implement and de-bug the embedded software, usually in the low level machine code (assembly).

This provided the engineer with the experience to develop a truly multi-discipline skill set. This skill set meant an exhaustive and complete understanding of a design they were working on, providing the added advantage of being able to take that design to a system level, which almost came for free.
However, the main advantage that they harboured was an implicit understanding, born from knowledge, of the hardware/software interfacing requirements of a design. This knowledge was virtually taken for granted but it was a skill in its own right, albeit largely unrecognised.

As the years went by, technology moved forward and more complex designs became readily available to the design teams. More powerful processors, more memory, high level language friendly architectures, give just a small idea of what the silicon designers were managing to achieve.
When microcontrollers hit the scene things started to get too specialised for the old school design engineer. To achieve design excellence there was a need to split the skill sets of the engineers to allow team members to focus on specific areas of a design. This included the embedded software and the “software engineer” was born.

Much of the software/hardware interfacing experience now needed to be applied inside the controller to gain a full understanding of the chipset being used. Furthermore, I/O interfacing requirements remained – the only difference was that the analogue to digital converter, for example, was now internal instead of external. The skill set developed by the electronic design engineer was perfectly matched to these requirements.

With applications varying in complexity and speciality we saw various programmable processors being brought to market. These ranged from simple 8 bit controllers to high end processors dedicated to powerful DSP and more. The speed of technology advancement was not about to stand still.
With improved silicon wafer design enabling the silicon designers to pack more and more into smaller spaces we saw middle ground controllers being brought to market that offer the best of both worlds. An excellent example of this would be Texas Instruments C2000 range of DSP’s that had a distinctly “embedded microcontroller” feel to them.

The incredible advancement in technology hasn't been limited to silicon. The development tools and compilers have all "grown up" to make the use of high level languages such as C a normality rather than a novelty. This increase in complexity further increased the reasoning behind specialisation of disciplines. Also, it further increases the need for the “embedded software engineer” to require the skill set of the old school design engineer.

We are now used to seeing firmware development treated as a completely separate entity and developed as a pure software skill. As a result thousands of positions within the electronics industry are now filled with the title "software engineer" tasked with developing software to run within an embedded environment. The key here is the term “software” with the word “embedded” being omitted.

Since these positions are often viewed in terms of pure software, many of them are increasingly filled with purely software-trained personnel. These people are highly trained and know their stuff but the hardware knowledge is no longer available, or developed through experience, to the person developing the firmware. The new age software engineer is trained and better suited to the design and development of PC application software, or the like, which is an entirely different thing.
The skill set for understanding implicitly the software/hardware interfacing is still, to this day, being taken for granted and yet the knowledge to back this up is being lost. At a time when the increase in complexity demands an increase in these skills, the industry is doing the exact opposite and actually decreasing them.
One could argue that the personnel who do still posses these skills can be thought of as a niche group of specialists. Backing this up would be the argument that the need to design to such a low level, where assembly language is a requirement, is reducing.

To counter these arguments consider a simple design where a high level language can be used and the controller is only put to light work. Even with a simple design, will the software engineer implement bug-free code first time? I think we all know the answer to that one! So how easily will this same engineer find de-bugging without the aforementioned skills

The most worrying thing for the industry is that it is likely to get worse. With the loss of old style apprenticeship schemes and higher education faculties focusing on the higher level areas of electronics, the basics are getting forgotten. Our next generation of electronics engineers may well be able to make some VHDL to run on a programmable logic device, but can they fluently count in binary or hexadecimal or even recite Ohm’s law without thinking? Of course, there is an obvious need to learn high level languages and modelling/simulation methodologies. However before these skills are developed, there needs to be good understanding beyond the software, to look at the operation of the device being programmed in order to make the mental connection between that line of code on the computer screen and the resultant flashing LED!

While we are seeing UK manufacturing moving oversees to embrace the cost advantages available, we are accepting the fact that we have to remain at the leading edge of the design abilities to continue to play a competitive role within the global electronics market. With this need firmly set for the future and with ever increasing pressures on time to market and reducing development costs, the issue of applying the correct skills to the correct tasks is something that Britain’s electronics industry can ill afford to continue to ignore.

This article was first published in Electronics Weekly magazine, 27th September 2006

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Taken to Task