Hardware design

Hardware Design Process

Designing hardware is much more constrained than software; while you may sometimes have great influence on the design of a chip many months in advance of availablility, you can only actually use chips which you can get in the volumes required at prices that you can afford. Even a single missing component, or component not available in the quantities you need, may cripple your production. Many in the software community, who are used to more fluid ability to modify design and produce in unlimited copies, find this a foreign concept.

Designing hardware is similar to making sausage: you may be able to grow new ingredients starting long in advance if you are friendly with farmers (chip designers). You can only make your sausage, however, with the ingredients required by your recipe that you can actually buy in the volume you need to manufacture. Sometimes you can substitute ingredients without spoiling the general recipe, and sometimes the result would be inedible. In this case, we have a single chip that Mark Foster is specifying, that sits between the CPU and the display, and over which we have detailed control.

If you'd like some insight into this process, you can look at older versions of this page in the wiki.

High-Volume Design and Manufacturing

Furthermore, production of high-volume hardware is now a very specialized business, and is now often joint between the organization/company that specifies what the hardware should do