The unknown life of Hardware Engineer

 

Hardware is everywhere. It has same importance as software or we call firmware in the embedded domain (but not in terms of compensation though.. don't take it seriously). The major difference that can differentiate between hardware and software engineers is that mistakes of hardware engineers cannot be recovered where as mistakes of firmware engineers can be recovered without much cost (resource costs to fix are usually ignored though). What all crap are we talking here? Let me come to the point.

While drawing a schematic, schematic engineer constructs the schematics in tools using various components. Every component schematic engineer adds is adding complexity to the schematic in terms of it's functionality later or in terms of EMI/EMC performance. There are various levels of engineers - Beginners, medium, experts. While experts might know to most extent, sometimes they struggle to understand the affects of the components added. For example, EMI/EMC is like a black box for designers. You might have taken care with your expertise and guidance form others still there is lot of chance for errors to creep in and you only realize in the compliance test. Hardware engineers are completely unaware of these scenarios. Not just that, when a schematic is drawn, we have ground path for each component, schematic engineer cannot visualize the ground path or return path at that instant. A view comes when PCB is laid out. Even PCB layout engineers who visualize the entire board and complete the PCB Layout might miss many points from the EMI/EMC perspective. A single route done casually might be a cause of big problem later. To put it frankly, there are very less engineers especially hardware engineers who put a thought process into the complications that rise later due to the components added at this moment in the schematic.

One way the schematics engineers might follow while drafting schematics is to assess the performance, issues section by section and move forward to next section. This way we also eliminate very bare minimum net connectivity issues and also get an understanding of how this interfaces electrically to other sections giving electrical engineer a good grip on the schematics.