Embedded Design Decisions
Architecture, silicon selection, firmware, and EMC, the calls made before layout starts.
Most hardware problems that surface in the field were decided long before the field. The MCU gets picked because a dev board was on the desk. A protocol gets chosen before anyone asks what the deployment environment demands. Compliance gets treated as a test to pass rather than a constraint on the schematic. By the time a prototype is on the bench, those calls are locked into the PCB and expensive to reverse.
These notes cover the architecture-level decisions that determine whether a field device survives its first year: choosing between a microcontroller and a microprocessor, budgeting power across real operating states, selecting bare-metal versus RTOS versus Embedded Linux, and designing for EMC and thermal constraints from the first draft rather than after a failed compliance run. Written for teams building their first hardware product and for established manufacturers wanting a second opinion before committing a design to production.
Related service: engineering consultancy, architecture strategy, MCU/MPU selection, power budgeting, and communication network design.