This progression has been helped in no small part by the arrival of the reference design and, more recently, devices such as Raspberry Pi and Arduino. These devices have combined to abstract the developer, to a greater or lesser extent, from the hardware design process. Engineers – maybe we should say developers – now start from a platform and focus mainly on the development of the software needed to enable the application. And it’s amazing how many of these apps are now written to run on an iPhone and to interact with a simple piece of hardware.
It’s something New Electronics recognised in 2011, when we got an Expert Panel together to discuss whether or not the hardware engineer was becoming an ‘endangered species’?
The conclusion of one panellist was: “Hardware designers will certainly continue to be needed! However, their role is evolving. Hardware designers need to understand the requirements of their software counterparts and to work closely with them to complete complex designs.”
So the question is whether, in the last five years, hardware designers have evolved and, if so, into what?
Engineers are supposed to be innovators, but it seems that innovation is becoming the province of a few companies producing ‘platforms’ – whatever they may be. Those platforms are then differentiated by software to meet particular application needs. Before, you might argue, all engineers needed to innovate almost from first principles to meet the needs of their customers.
Yet the industry’s drivers over the last five decades remain the same – creating products with more functionality, which consume less power and which cost less. These targets are mainly delivered by hardware design.
But change isn’t restricted to hardware; the world of the electronics journalist has certainly changed over the years. Where there used to be a strong focus on components and design, that focus has broadened out to include developments like IBM’s Lab on a Chip or the creation of a bioelectronics company by pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) and Alphabet subsidiary Verily Life Sciences (formerly Google Life Sciences).
The world of electronics is changing and New Electronics has consistently sort to maintain its relevance to its readership, so one of the questions we’ll be asking in the coming weeks is what you would like us to cover. And we’ll be interested to hear what you think.
