So, what are embedded engineers up to in all of this? At the recent ESS (Embedded System Show), Britain’s leading exhibition and conference, I talked to a number of the exhibitors to try and get a qualitative overview for what is happening today.

While ESS is a small brother of the ESCs of the US and the even bigger embedded world in February in Germany, it still attracts around 2500 attendees, mainly from within Britain. It provides a good barometer for the general feeling in the industry, and for the second year running the barometer was reading “set fair” with the feeling among exhibitors that visitors were working on real projects and coming to the show to find solutions to real problems, not just tire kicking.

A striking feature of the UK scene is the range of size of companies with, at one end, the multi-national aerospace and defence companies and at the other, one- and two-man operations and an increasing number of start-ups.

Statistically, the leading application area is industrial automation, although interestingly, the larger tool vendors don’t mention this as a key sales area – which suggests that engineers in this area are not buying from the larger tool vendors.

What the tool vendors do mention is aerospace and defence. Defence spending, at around $50 billion a year, is less than 10% of that of the US, but this still makes Britain the fourth largest defence spender in the world, after the US, Russia and China. (UK based BAE Systems is ranked fourth in the world on turnover, with the privatised defence research organisation QinetiQ also in the top ten). And the defence industry worldwide uses tools in a large way, mainly to meet the demanding qualification requirements of the purchasers. As in the US, large projects are often collaborative, but with pan-European involvement, with contractors in several countries and contracts being allocated within the project by country affiliation of the contractors. This can lead to interesting issues in collaboration.

An area that rather unexpectedly attracts a lot of attention is cell phones. One expects these to be designed in Scandinavia or Asia. However, a world leading service provider, Vodafone, is headquartered in England, (Vodafone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless) and every handset manufacturer appears to have a development centre close by. While many of these are only “vodafone-ising” their existing designs, others are developing new products. And of course, while the handsets are the visible part of the service, there is a huge market in the infrastructure, again with strong British involvement. Surrounding these companies is a significant number of small companies who are developing point tools and specialised applications. An international player who is gaining success in this area is Swedish based ENEA, whose OSE RTOS was designed to work in mixed environments.

While Britain no longer has a volume car manufacturer, and mainstream automotive electronics is driven by activities in Germany, Britain still has a solid automotive presence. Out of the 20 Formula One Grand Prix cars that raced this season, 12 were designed and manufactured in the UK. One of these is Renault, which has just won the Constructors Championship for the second year in succession. (The entire grid of the USA’s Champ Car World Series has been supplied by UK firms for many years.) Again there is an extended infrastructure of small specialist companies supplying the electronics to these companies (and the electronics in Formula One is often spectacular).

And this is an important aspect of British electronics – lots of small companies designing specialist things, from design tools to consumer goods. Products may be manufactured in Asia, and most are, but design takes place in the UK. All the people I spoke to paid tribute to British creativity and technology and admired the way this was being channelled through an increasing number of start-ups right across the electronics spectrum.

Electronics Weekly, the British equivalent of EETimes, regularly tracks new start-ups. Their web site shows over 135, and there are certainly more that are not yet listed.

Many of the start-ups that are developing products (rather than tools) are using FPGAs to show proof of concept, according to Frank Hoschar of Altium. The thinking seems to be that initial funding is sufficient to demonstrate that the idea will work, by a demonstration in an FPGA. This can then be used to raise the funds for the significant tooling to move into production. This view was echoed by Doug Amos of Synplicity, who is also seeing significant start-up activity. Overall there is British financial backing both for this first stage and for the move to volume, frequently off-shore.

Evolutionary development in start-ups is also recognised by Wind River. Steve Harris feels that a start-up will typically use open source tools to get the most out of their budget. When they get more funding or start generating revenues, the team will want to continue with the open system approach but will be able to afford to go to third party vendors for their Linux- or Eclipse-based tools, both of which Wind River are happy to sell to them.

Fabless, flash microcontroller company, Cyan Technologies is an example of a British company that has made the tricky step from an interesting idea to volume sales. Its eCog 16-bit architecture is used in a wide range of applications. At first, design wins were in Britain or Europe with manufacturing taking place in China. Now Cyan is seeing increasing design wins in China, a market that is so big that it is almost impossible to grasp (rather like the definition of space in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.)¹

Guy Voelckaerts, for Digi International, also sees design in the UK and manufacturing in Asia but has identified an increasing trend where the broad sweep of a design is done in Europe with detailed implementation of the design as well as manufacturing taking place in Asia.

One aspect of working in small teams is that there often isn’t a split between the hardware group and the software group. Most of the engineers attending ESS were involved in both software development and systems engineering, and a significant percentage were also involved in test and verification.

This would seem fertile ground for modelling, but again it is the bigger companies who are adopting modelling techniques, according to Telelogic’s Patrick Register, who is responsible, amongst other things, for selling the Rhapsody embedded modelling tools in Europe.

In summary, then, Britain’s embedded scene is full of small companies with exciting new ideas (fuelled perhaps by room temperature beer). And don’t forget that ARM, responsible for the architecture appearing in a huge range of embedded applications, is also British.

Notes on capitalisation:
Those that think up new company names love to play with capital letters, so
1: In German, all nouns start with a capital letter, so for embedded world to use all lower case is to be seen as advanced and exciting (well – sort of).
2: In English, proper names normally start with a capital letter, so putting a capital at the end of QinetiQ (pronounced kinetic) is seen as advanced and exciting. So is using the letter Q without a u immediately following: the Oxford English Dictionary has only a small handful of transcribed Chinese and Arabic words that don’t follow Q with u.

¹Space: Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindboggingly big it is. 
(Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)