Statistics on State of the Embedded Industry  

The embedded industry is always in flux, varying processor size, operating systems, and all user-interaction. Here are a few statistics from a recent study on how the embedded industry is faring:

• 56 percent of development projects are adding new features or upgrading existing ones.
• Most development teams have a cycle of 12 months on an average and just 38 percent of them manage to complete their project within the given time.
• A large proportion of teams begin projects with off-the-shelf development boards.
• 36 percent purchase hardware rather than developing their own hardware.
• 71 percent of development teams reuse old hardware designs and 86 percent reuse their older code.
• The most common language used by embedded developer is C (60 percent of all embedded teams worldwide use this language, including 74 percent of Asian teams).
• About 30 percent of the development time goes into designing the product. The next highest proportion of time is taken by testing and debugging.
• 18 percent of embedded developers said they would like to work with better debugging tools. 17 percent were worried about the skill level of their team.
• 68 percent of embedded developers prefer to work with 32 bit processors. Only 13 percent and 9 percent use 16 bit processors and 8 bit processors, respectively.
• 60 percent of embedded designs (OS) have open source code.

Another thing that has changed is the clock speed of processors. The average clock speed is now 397 Mhz. Close to half of all embedded designs have a clock speed of less than 100 Mhz or equal to 100 Mhz.