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The 2025 Embedded Online Conference

Better Hardware Design Decisions, Faster: A Lean Team’s Guide to MDO

Emmanuel Odunlade

As design complexity grows, siloed decision-making often leads to late-stage surprises, costly rework, and missed opportunities for optimization. Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) offers a structured approach to solving this by enabling teams to evaluate trade-offs and impacts across the full system—before implementation begins. Traditionally used in large, high-budget industries like aerospace, MDO is now within reach for lean teams, thanks to more accessible modeling tools and an urgent need for tighter collaboration. This article outlines how small hardware teams can adopt MDO in a practical way—starting simple, integrating key models early, and building toward a culture of systems thinking. The result is better design decisions, faster development, and more robust, manufacturable products—with fewer surprises along the way.


How to Achieve Deterministic Behavior in Real-Time Embedded Systems

Lance Harvie

Ensuring deterministic behavior in real-time embedded systems is paramount for their reliability and performance. The ability to predict precisely how a system will respond to various inputs at any given time is crucial in critical applications such as medical devices, aerospace systems, and automotive safety mechanisms. Achieving deterministic behavior involves meticulous design, stringent testing, and adherence to strict timing constraints.


Hidden Gems from the Embedded Online Conference Archives - Part 3

Tim Guite

Jack Ganssle shows us what we can learn by studying previous failures - and why this is essential for anyone working in embedded systems.


Vintage multi-core and “so long”

Colin Walls

A personal and historical perspective on multi-core system design.


Working with Microchip PIC 8-bit Interrupts

Luther Stanton

This fifth and final post of the Getting Started with Microchip PIC 8 Bit Development series looks at interrupts on 8-bit PIC microcontrollers. After a review of basic interrupt functionality, actual implementation is explored through implementation of a four bit counter driven via Timer0 interrupts whose value is displayed through four LEDs on Microchip's Curiosity HPC Development Board.


Hidden Gems from the Embedded Online Conference Archives - Part 2

Tim Guite

A look back at a deep dive into the Mars Perseverance flight software from one of the technical leads at JPL.


Hidden Gems from the Embedded Online Conference Archives - Part 1

Tim Guite

Discussion of a "hidden gem" from the Embedded Online Conference archives!


Optimizing Hardware Design: Reducing Iterations with DSM

Emmanuel Odunlade

Often, product teams curate feature roadmaps that fail to account for the interdependencies in product components. For this article, I wrote about how system architecture tools like Design(dependency) Structure matrix (DSM) can be used to evaluate feature roadmaps to avoid the purgatory of change propagation and accompanying endless Iteration loops. These iteration loops are sometimes affordable (manageable) in software development (Agile saves lives), but for hardware teams - especially small product teams and startups - the lost time, and money is the stuff of which product graves are made.


The 2025 Embedded Online Conference