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Is Microprocessor/Controller Design Dead?
blanchae asks: "I work for a Canadian post-secondary institute and I have been scouring the web job sites, newspapers and newsgroups for career adds for microprocessor/controller based electronic designers at the technology level (2 years training). We are re-evaluating our curriculum and are looking at the job market as one way of warranting specialization training to existing programs. There's lots of career adds for embedded controller designers with University degrees but not a thing for technology level microprocessor/controller design. It is very puzzling. So the question is: Is microprocessor/controller design dead? Has it moved offshore? Is it off the radar and mainly in small upstart companies (5 to 25 employees) that hire word of mouth and not through the big corporate media methods?"
In response to other postings, we do have industry contacts but you must appreciate that when an educational institute comes knocking asking for information, the priority on answering is way down on the list of things to do like emptying the garbage can...
I agree that word of mouth is a common method of finding suitable employees and that's what I did when I was looking to hire employees when I was in industry. The issue is how to track the "word of mouth" career offerings?
Slashdot is on the pulse of technology and seems like a quick and dirty method of acquiring data. How much value is put on the data is dependant on the quality and quantity.
It's only one method of acquiring data. Slashdot is a forum for geeks, many of which play with microprocessors. Who better to ask? I didn't say what I would do with the feedback...
I licked quite a bit of the microcontroller-based embedded design, and from what I saw, only amateurs, and only most clueless of them use separate processor and controller. In the past it was making sense. Nowadays the market is saturated with microcontrollers that carry enormous amounts of extra hardware on chip and a hour with soldering iron spent on including a dedicated controller chip in the project can be easily avoided by a hour of browsing the catalogues for derivative that has that controller on-chip. Price increases are often negligible. Speeds are amazing.
5 : 75MHz 64M addressable, ethernet, 1w, spi, CAN, 3x RS232, 8x bidi 8-bit GPIO, IP stack plus UDP, TCP, DHCP, ICMP, TFTP, IGMP in ROM, Wake-On-Lan, watchdog, clocks, and God knows what more.
www.fairchildsemi.com/products/micro/ - SOIC-8 package, the size of an optocoupler - 8 pins, thingy would fit on the nail of your pinky, whole, with surface-mount pins. 64 bytes of RAM, 1-2K of program eprom, 64 bytes of data eprom, clocks, power monitoring, wake-up on any pin, 6 GPIO lines, eeprom writing, watchdog, serial output generator, sleep mode, idle mode, oscillator, and quite a few other goodies.
On the other end of the scale: http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm/qv_pk/453
Add to that DSPs which are quite specific but achieve speeds higher than newest pentiums and athlons in their tasks (and often carry some "extra", add PC for heavyweight number-crunching and user interaction and you see:
Controllers are dead. Microcontroller is way better because it allows for just the same on the hardware side, while vastly simplifying the interface side. With your current knowledge you should catch up and learn microcontroller-based design pretty fast.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
To do micro controller work, you need to know EVERYTHING from how to create thread-safe stuff with no memory management to how to implement mathematical functions found in second/third year of a maths degree with UNSIGNED arithmetic. You need to know how hardware behaves when its faulty, and you need to know whether the compiler is faulty or the hardware, or your code is defective - and get it RIGHT.
And in most cases you probably need good client facing skills, the ability to work bizarre hours, and a willingness to put up with shitty conditions of employment.
The reward for all this is the chance to laugh at those better dressed and housed than you, in their posh cars with their trophy wives, knowing that its thanks to you their engine management system has left them stranded on the highway in a $60,000 car!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
There are basically three categories of microprocessor design. And armed with an electronic degree, one can decide which area to focus on:
1. CUSTOM BOARD INTEGRATOR
3. PROGRAMMERS (both HW and Software)
3. THE MICROPROCESSOR DESIGNER
All areas entail different stages (and thus different skills). They basically cover requirements, designs, coding, integration, testing and maintenance. It is entirely possible to have a lifelong career in just within one of those stages, particularly test and maintenance.
Even so, each area utilize different skill sets.
1. Lowest man on the totem pole (but still well-paid) is the custom board integrator. Involves research and selection of hardware components using interchangeable interfaces (i.e., PCI, PCI-X, LVDS, Rocket I/O, VME and lesser known interfaces such as USB, Firewire, Parallel and serial). Testing of each HW components (not to get bad capacitors) are a non-trivial effort. Most low-budget company skimp these component testings. Nevertheless, it entails buildup around THE microprocessor.
2. Midway is the programmer. VHDL, Synoptic and many other custom hardware programming languages which tends to be chipset-specific. Bulk of the job market are in this category.
3. The elite is THE microprocessor designer. Intel, AMD, IBM, Motorola, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Xilinx and many others make uses of M-Designers. Most of them tend to be cultivated from within each company. Much research material have to be digested and assimulated to be able to design one of today's complexity. Best and easiest break into this arena is startup company, successful or not.
I suggest, for a startup university department, you shoot for #2 as the majority of your curriculums. This ensures that these skill-sets are transportable to either #1 or #3, depending on how good they grasp the elementary logics.
[finally, something on Slashdot that I can comment intelligently about]
I work for a small (6 EE, 10 ME, 20 Industrial designers) design firm. Small and large companies come to us for all kinds of design work, some of it is development or improvement of EE designs.
We're always doing some sort of microprocessor/controller design, as well as CPLD and FPGA programmable logic. Pretty much every job we do incorporates one or more micros. In the past three years, I've used PICs, TI's MSP430, Freescales MC9S12, Atmels and probably a couple more. Development is done on PCs, running something like a Metroworks IDE. Sometimes we use an embedded OS like uCos, sometimes not.
At least from where I sit, microprocessors are still very much relevant. I'm currently working on an embedded controller for a mechanical system -- two motors, limit switches, temperature sensors and two serial communication ports to other controllers not built by us. There's analog and digital interface design, the micro is a Freescale 9S12, power supply regulators and more. Lots of fun!