These are my own personal views and those of my company Phaedrus Systems. www.phaedsys.org which is where the full version of this column resides under the Technical Papers button.

 

Hopefully by the time you read this the MISRA-C example suite should be available. see www.misra-c2.org We have delivered the ZIP file to MIRA for release. (email me) Only 5 months late! Technical Corrigendum next (50% complete) and then on to MISRA-C3 but that won’t be out for a year or two (my guess).

 

The other interesting language event is that ISO C++ is looking at adding in garbage collection I.e. tidying up all the objects in memory when they are no longer needed. Not everyone uses destructors properly. Good in theory but from the comments I have seen from some with real, not theoretical, experience of implementing languages we could end up with a bigger mess. Perhaps I am biased but I still prefer the comparative simplicity of C90.

 

I was going to end this column with the following amusing story from one of my customers but other events have made it more significant. They were ordering some items from a US Company that has, over the last year or two flooded the UK with catalogues. They dispatch UK orders from the US. To make up the minimum order and not incur the small-order-charge the UK based customer added on a Keil LPC ARM7 kit. The supplier said they could not export that because there is a US government restriction on shipping certain technology out of the US! Even to friendly countries it seems. Let’s examine the technology that the US will not export to Europe….

 

The ARM7 part on the board was an NXP (Philips) part… Philips/NXP being a Netherlands company; that is Netherlands, Europe. The package itself is a Keil board/JTAG package. That is Keil (Munich, Germany, Europe)…. No wait, Keil were recently bought by…. ARM, Cambridge (UK not MA) and the ARM core itself does, of course, come from ARM UK anyway.

 

So exactly what was the technology the US government trying to restrict from the UK? Especially as the Keil/ARM distribution warehouse they get their stock from is in Basingstoke UK less than 50 miles from the expectant end user!

 

The US has always been strong on irrational protectionism… I recall back in the 90’s the Applied Cryptography book came with a CD containing the source code for most of the ciphers in the book. Whilst the book was sold all over the world the CD could not be obtained outside the US because the crypto source was seen as a “weapon”. Ironically many of the ciphers, and certainly the major ones, on the CD in source code form came from Europe, and a couple from the USSR. There are several web sites outside the US that contain all the source code from the CD but still you can not buy a copy of the CD this side of the Atlantic. Any one who has the book and wants the source code please email me.

 

Recently in some areas of the embedded industry I have had people tell me they are avoiding any US technology because of the changing, retrospective, export restrictions. After incorporating the bought in technology or tools they use in products they are told that the list of countries they can’t sell to, or use the technology in, has changed. Worse it might change again at any time. This came home last week when I was shown a recently issued document that did just that.

 

There is a European company that has just been bought by an American company. The customers of the European (now US owned) company were sent letters telling them they could not use the tools they had already bought and were using in some countries that had not been on the list before. In the case in question one of the countries listed the user has been working in for some time… So are they now expected to move people and plant? Re-engineer their strategy, processes and products? With the current world situation Engineers need to be a lot more aware of current affairs and politics than they used to be. I will probably come back to that in the summer edition. Should Engineers be political. must professionalism be politically neutral?

 

The far-east and outsourcing situation is changing too. ITweek seems to think that IT outsourcing bubble has, if not burst, then stopped expanding. However this is largely due to a slowdown in the US. One only has to look at the value of the USD to realize that, with increasing salaries in China and India that for the US the far-east is not the “cheap option” any more. So the accountants and share-holders dream of cheap labour is disappearing. However is it too late for the European electronics industry? I think it probably is for some sectors.

 

India, China, Taiwan etc are ramping up its R&D rather than production skills and as I mentioned in the last column, moving into high integrity systems. In fact they look like doing the whole process. So for some European and US consumer electronics companies the writing is on the wall.

 

This week a friend was looking for a cheap LCD monitor. They came up with a name I had not heard of before. I investigated. Yes this was a far-east company with a presence in Europe for only the last 18 months. However as a production company for the big names it has been producing screens for well over a decade.

 

One of the world’s largest laptop manufacturers is now doing their own brand. In fact 85% of Laptops are manufactured by Far eastern companies. In fact I believe that Dell, HP and others are made in the same factory. So it seems the far-east production houses are now going to cut out the middle man and go direct to the European, US, in fact the world markets.

 

The Times has a item (13th May 2007) that says many UK “cash strapped” universities are giving preference to Chinese, and other foreign students over local UK students, even to the extent of “relaxing” entry requirements for the overseas students in fact one of my customers told me his old university now has no UK students on its electronics courses! Why? They get more money for foreign students.

Worse still some are UK Universities are franchising their courses to over seas universities. You can get a degree from some UK universities without leaving Shanghai! Anyone who has done any training in the far east know they don’t like to call it “training” for cultural reasons but “technology transfer” and in reality that is exactly what it is. For reasons of short term business gains for shareholders and the management looking good on the balance sheet we have transferred the technology out of Europe and the US to the far-east.

Hopefully the UK will retain its specialist electronics and smaller companies will still want local or in house development. Ironically Working Lunch the business program had an item on a new board game for schools called the Business Enterprise Game all about making and selling things with the emphasis on local businesses. You have to set up a factory, build stock send out sales reps to visit the companies around the board. You can only sell to places where a sale rep has been. You need trucks to deliver the goods. the goods are represented by containers, the contents are what ever you are manufacturing. It is a complete manufacturing to retail model.

 

The game is is designed to get the children to think about a career in the manufacturing business in the UK on traditional lines. However the greatest lesson the game has is in small print on the side of the box of this Great British idea it says .. "made in China"