Accelerating innovation with smaller teams

Intelligence is being added to more systems every day. Smart power metering, home automation and in-home medical devices are a few examples that will be ubiquitous in just a few years. Not only are there more embedded systems around us, they are also becoming more complex. The same trend in the consumer space can be seen in industry as well, as industry extends its capabilities by leveraging emerging technologies. Electronic systems and machines are adding control and monitoring systems that improve performance, quality and differentiation. As enabling technologies become available, our advanced manufacturing, process monitoring and control capabilities continue to expand. An ever-increasing number of design starts and escalating complexities are forcing embedded system design teams to be more efficient and are influencing the technology they choose to use. To address these market needs and help teams get to market faster, technology providers are developing components, modules or even complete embedded platforms with higher levels of integration and increased functionality. Ultimately, they are working towards a complete platform for embedded design containing communications, processing, system I/O and integrated system design software.

In the upcoming decade, software tools will play a more critical role in system design and development. In the past, many embedded designs were dictated by embedded hardware capabilities and mapping them to the system requirements. Due to the reduction in power, cost and size of embedded hardware over the last decade, hardware will no longer limit or dictate many embedded design choices - productivity will. Productivity will be driven by tightly integrated software design tools that can use off-the-shelf hardware capabilities with an environment intuitive enough to be used by nearly all engineers and scientists, not only those trained in embedded software, firmware development or hardware description languages.

With the nature of the economic situation as it is today, businesses cannot just spend their way into innovation. Agile competitors are emerging around the world and are proving that innovation can happen just as fast, if not faster, in smaller design teams. They are delivering disruptive innovations to market in shorter time periods and with equivalent, and in some cases better, quality than their traditional competitors. This is happening in established economies and equally, if not more impressively, in emerging economies as well.

Looking at technology platforms and tools available to businesses today, there are two predominant competing design approaches. One is the traditional way of thinking, which means for a business to deliver innovation, it has to vertically integrate the hardware and software stack itself and ‘own’ the design of all these components to deliver the quality and experience customers expect. This approach normally requires a larger design team and seems to fit better in industries where product volumes are astronomical or the design team is iterating on an existing custom design, like the consumer electronics market. The alternative methodology is the emerging approach of using off-the-shelf, system-level tools with a standard ecosystem of technology that can help accelerate the process of innovation without compromising the ability to differentiate. This approach has proved to be a better fit for areas of aggressive innovation, such as renewable energy, advanced manufacturing and robotics, as it uses standard off-the-shelf hardware components and prebuilt software tools that are friendlier and more tolerant to quick changes.

*Matej Krajnc, Director, National Instruments Oceania, has over 25 years of engineering industry experience. He is an internationally known speaker, trend analyst and applied engineering consultant. His expertise covers various fields, including automated test, control and design for the military, mining and automotive industries. Krajnc’s specialisations include process engineering, computer-based modelling, system integration and chemical engineering.