I started my career in technology in 1985. Back then the UK still made stuff and Japan was seen as the emerging technology supremo. I studied hardware and system engineering which was basically 40% hardware design 50% system and control theory and 10% software. It was far from clear back then the role software would go on to play so if I was to have my time again I would opt for a more computer science based course however there is still something special about hardware.
Since then we've seen Japan come and go and China emerge as the world's place to manufacture stuff. Apart from analog electronics, digital hardware has become more and more standard off the shelf chips and software to drive it. If I think back to 1996 when I was working for Nortel (I had seen the light and was more management than hands-on technologist), we were investing in hardware chips to build an ATM data switch and the state of the art hardware was a 40Gbit/s switching fabric. Less than 10 years prior this would have seen impossible to achieve in hardware without creating lots of latency through ultra wide data buses.
Today it's perfectly possible to achieve 40Gbit/s on a modest processor - today's processors have the challenge that the input/output (I/O) struggles to keep up.
Making stuff in China makes sense - it's cheap however there are several trends that make me wonder whether we are about to see a rebirth of hardware and in particular the emergence of this in the UK.
Why do I think this?
- China is great if you want large quantities of stuff but not if you want small volumes of specialised stuff
- China is increasingly becoming more expensive with wage increases. The price delta between making small quantities of stuff in the UK vs making it in China is falling. A recent TV programme showed there was only about 50p difference between making something like a cushion in China vs making it in the UK!
The other thing I've observed is that the barriers to entry to making hardware have fallen. Take logic analysers. In my early days of engineering, to purchase a digital logic analyser it would be £50-100k or maybe rent one for £10k per month. You can buy a USB based 8 probe logic analyser now for as little as £12 !
The other thing I've observed is the emergence of useful units of computing like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino. It's possible to build computer controlled hardware at low cost. These boards are designed with expansion in mind so the budding UK hardware company in the UK can design and make (via someone else) a small board for these devices and develop the software to make it work. OK software is important in these applications but nether-the-less there may be a small custom hardware component.
As an interesting data point, the country of manufacture of the very low cost Raspberry Pi is Wales! Originally it was made in China but production is shifting to the UK!
The few hardware manufacturers that have survived in the UK are very competitive. There are companies where you can upload your circuit board design from the Internet and you get it back a few days later - not
much different to getting some pictures printed. Shipping from China is slow so the UK has a competitive advantage in lead times in the European market.
Following the banking crisis, I think the mood in the UK has changed and bubbling under the surface is a desire to rebuild manufacturing. If you make a product you need a case and plastic tooling costs have traditionally meant that the product needed to be high volume. Here there is another interesting technology shift to support my low volume hardware argument. 3D printing is becoming incredibly cheap meaning that printing plastic cases in single quantities is cost effective. OK not particularly fast but faster than getting them made in China and shipped over.
Historically the UK has had a reputation for technology innovation. As a nation we may not have fully capitalised on our inventions but we have certainly demonstrated we have the creativity.
I therefore believe with all these trends converging we will see the emergence of low volume specialist hardware companies based in the UK.
