I am Lao Wen, an embedded engineer passionate about learning. Follow me, and let's become better together!
As an embedded software engineer who transitioned into this field later in my career, when I am not coding and writing bugs, I have a small habit: keeping an eye on the product updates from major industry players.
What do product updates from major chip companies refer to? For example, checking if Espressif has released new chips for the ESP32 series, tracking the development trends of Xuantie RISC-V, monitoring the progress of the Matter protocol, and following the development of AI chips from Rockchip, and so on. (Basically, just looking around everywhere to see what's going on.)
Why pay attention to product updates from these major companies? The underlying logic is that these giants usually have highly professional product teams. They conduct thorough market research to plan and develop products with high market fit.
(Simply put, products from major companies serve as a barometer for hot technologies!)
Personally, I believe that as an embedded engineer, continuously following product updates from major companies is a critical path for our technical growth and a core strategy for maintaining our professional competitiveness.
We can understand specific product updates from major companies through several channels: official releases, community updates, exhibition information, and investment/financing situations. Personally, I prefer reading official WeChat account posts or visiting their websites, and sometimes I even drop by exhibition venues.
As semiconductor chips are one of the cornerstones of all embedded hardware products, product updates from original chip manufacturers can actually provide immense inspiration for embedded engineers. For instance, I will take Rockchip, a company familiar to many, as an example to share some information about them.
Many embedded engineers know that a couple of weeks ago, Rockchip hosted a developer conference (RKDC2025) at the Fuzhou Strait International Conference and Exhibition Center. This conference attracted widespread attention from various industries and revealed a lot of information about the chip industry.
Rockchip's earnings forecast for the first half of 2025 shows highly impressive growth figures. Therefore, this company is quite representative in the embedded semiconductor industry, especially in the AIoT sector.
To elaborate, Rockchip was founded in Fuzhou in 2001. When it was first established, it seemed to be manufacturing language repeaters. Its general development trajectory is: 2001 Language Repeaters --> 2006 MP3 --> 2009 Android Tablets --> 2014 IoT --> 2018 AIoT --> 2021 Smart Cockpits.
From the perspective of chip development in recent years, Rockchip's chip product line mainly adopts a platform-based strategy of "high-low matching," primarily allowing low-end chip products to amortize the costs of high-end IPs.
For example: from the RK3588 (flagship), to the RK3576 (mid-to-high-end), to the RK3562/RK3506 (entry-level), forming a continuous price/performance spectrum. Chips at different levels use the same SDK and the same NPU toolchain.
Rockchip's PMICs (Power Management ICs), Wi-Fi/BT Combo chips, audio codecs, and interface conversion chips are all independently researched and designed. This allows them to be bundled with their own processor chips, so customers do not need to search everywhere for components or adapt drivers for other chips.
Since the company went public, Rockchip's R&D expense ratio has generally remained stable at around 20%, with at least 500 million RMB invested annually in new chip IP R&D, such as NPU, ISP, audio DSP, and so on.
With the advent of the edge AI era, Rockchip has been continuously making efforts in the AIoT field, dedicated to truly running large AI models on edge embedded devices. This genuinely enables embedded devices to complete AI model inference computations on-site without relying on the cloud.
At this RKDC2025 developer conference, Rockchip released news about several high-performance processors (more powerful than the flagship chip RK3588), such as the two new-generation flagship chips RK3668 and RK3688, as well as the co-processor RK1860 (with NPU computing power reaching 60~80 TOPS), which can run mainstream on-device large models.
Judging from the design direction of these AIoT chips, they are basically focused on emerging fields such as automotive smart cockpits, industrial vision, and robotics. This also indirectly confirms that the technological directions in these industries are the hot topics with high market attention. (In other words, these technological directions are well-funded!)
Therefore, from the above examples, it can be seen that the small habit of "following product updates from original chip manufacturers" can indeed help embedded engineers acquire a lot of non-technical information, thereby enhancing their technical sensitivity and avoiding the passive state in their career caused by focusing solely on daily tasks without seeing the big picture.
Besides following the updates from major chip companies, embedded engineers can also pay attention to the product layouts of well-known board solution providers. This is mainly because original chip manufacturers usually collaborate with board solution providers to jointly promote their own chip products.
Some enterprises may find it difficult to get in touch with original chip manufacturers or obtain their technical support. However, some capable board solution providers can offer such technical support. Therefore, the board products heavily promoted by these solution providers also serve as a certain technical barometer.
For example, to fully support the commercialization of products based on Rockchip chip solutions, Forlinx Embedded, as a strategic partner of Rockchip, has launched a promotional campaign for development boards, featuring three models: RK3506, RK3562, and RK3576. (Note: these are development boards!)
The price of a development board has dropped to an unprecedented low (starting from 88 RMB including tax). What does this phenomenon indicate? It indicates that with the optimization of manufacturing processes, it is possible to continuously reduce product prices while ensuring quality, thereby providing users with a more cost-effective product experience!