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?"

Comments

Re:not dead ...

[Omega Hacker]

Um, I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about using existing microcontrollers (e.g. PIC, AVR, lesser ARMs, etc.) in projects, not designing new processors...

I've done commercial projects of such a nature myself, with only a tiny bit of formal training. Such things are trivially within the grasp of a 2-year degree holder with appropriate training.

You need to look at what happened to this industry

[GrpA]

It's not dofficult to work out what happened. I started out in this career path long ago, straight out of high school. Back then, I was designing Z-80 based computer systems... Later, I went on to MCS-48 and MCS-51 based designs as well as flirting with x86 and 68xx(x) architectures at times.

I was pretty good at it. My success ratio exceeded 90% throughout my career. And I was a one-man engineering lab... From design (including PLDs) through fabrication, prototyping and production following successful prototyping. Many of my successful projects were valued in the millions of dollars to the companies I worked for, back in the 80's.

But there's not many people with those sort of skills, so over time, employers couldn't get the skills cheaply and stopped advertising for those people. They turned to PCs to perform jobs that would normally be performed on micro's or found other ways to do things. Most design work became an offshoot to inhouse production teams and never really became a critical business component.

And when someone did have an engineer with those skills, they tended to undervalue them. I worked for many employers as a part of their churn. I replaced a cheap engineer and they weren't prepared to pay extra for the skills I brought to the position. Not all employers can see the value of someone who can design a modem out of three 20pin PALs or produce an engine management unit if all they want is someone to design their latest pinpad.

The lack of people who could cut perfect code in assembly language and manually route circuits more efficiently than the auto-routing algorythms of the day became less important as circuit design apps got better and processors got fast enough that high level languages could be used instead of low level languages.

So more people came in to the industry, but lacked the skills. Employers worked around it by asking less of them, but that diluted the products and so in turn diluted the value of such engineers to their employers.

Universities and technical education centres simply couldn't produce the skills in people coming up. This further diluted the available skills resources.

And no matter that you can get away with this 95% of the time, the other 5% of the time, you need the low-level skills. Otherwise your success ratio tend to drop below 50%.

It got to the point where the average wage earner made around $40K per year, and Electronic Engineers in my city (Major capital city) would average about $35K.

So I usually left after a while, chasing salary increases with other companies, when the ones I worked for didn't want to pay.. Until one day I realised I could make more for my family just by doing basic low-level tech work as a PC assembler. So I threw away my old skills and became another tech on the production line.

Everyone else I knew - people who designed their own home PCs from the chips up only ten years earlier did the same... they became miners, postmen, builders. The work was less stressful, less hours and paid better. Some stayed. The lucky ones found companies that looked after them. It was rare.

But now with only the diluted skills left in the marketplace, employers had a problem. I would speak to old employers who seemed suprised that their new projects were failing and no engineers were left. They wondered why it took a 386 processor and six weeks of C development to develop and debug a replacement to a keypad that cost $300 per unit to make that replaced one I designed for them from concept to prototype using $30 of parts with an MCS51 just six years earlier.

So Business got out of that industry also. No engineering skills means it's not viable business. So they got into PC software development or similar related industries and just dropped that line of revenue from their business model.

So, No new low-level skills, No engineers with the skills available to fix the problem and no positions because companies let this source of revenue die out.

And the industry disappeared.