Will single chip opportunities be eliminated? Are microcontrollers still useful today?

I often read some questions on the Internet about whether PLC will be replaced by MCU, and whether MCU will be replaced by PLC.

If the technology you have worked so hard to learn becomes obsolete by then, it will be a big trap.

I have been engaged in development work in the microcontroller industry for 10 years. What I feel most deeply is that the industry is getting better and better. There is an increasing shortage of talents in this field, and wages are getting higher and higher.

Around 2018, I took care of a brother who worked on production line maintenance. At that time, my department was short of manpower and it was difficult to recruit from outside, so I planned to train one from within the company.

I later picked a maintenance guy because he was familiar with the company's products and had a solid foundation. He was able to develop projects on his own after about three months. By that time, his salary had risen from more than 5,000 to more than 8,000.

When I contacted him some time ago, he told me that he had changed his job and the salary was about 18K.

At that time, I was still a little different. Later, three company managers asked me if I had engineers to introduce, and I realized that the demand in this industry was growing.

Of course, no matter what I say, it is not as good as if you go to the recruitment platform and search for the position of microcontroller engineer or embedded engineer, the salary will be more realistic.

I haven't looked for a job in at least 3 years, and I haven't updated my resume, but every day I get inquiries from companies about whether they want to change jobs.

We can see that the relevant job salaries on the recruitment platform are also very good, which is enough to prove that this industry is booming.

Let’s talk about why this industry is getting better and better?

The single-chip microcomputer itself has many applications in traditional industries. For example, household appliances: rice cookers, microwave ovens, induction cookers, washing machines, range hoods, air conditioners, etc. are all applications of single-chip microcomputers.

This volume is already very large, and there are other fields, such as medical electronics, automotive electronics, industrial control, military industry, etc.

There is also the development of the Internet of Things. The shared bicycles, smart homes, Internet of Vehicles, charging piles, etc. we are currently using are all typical applications of microcontrollers.

The Internet of Things can empower microcontrollers, allowing them to add networking functions to traditional hardware to achieve remote monitoring.

The biggest advantage of doing this is that it can improve efficiency, make it smarter, and save costs.

For example, shared bicycles are internally developed based on microcontrollers, which can effectively solve the problem of people's travel efficiency. As each individual's efficiency improves, the overall efficiency will improve. This potential value is huge.

Therefore, the Internet of Things is definitely not a gimmick, but a trend, because it can be implemented and can truly solve human or social problems.

The things in the Internet of Things are actually our hardware. Anyone who wants to connect to the Internet must write a program.

Based on product design, cost factors need to be considered, so most hardware will use microcontrollers for secondary development, and high-end products will use ARM+Linux.

Final summary: Based on the prospects of microcontrollers, I think elimination is unlikely. I can only say that they will be updated and iterated. Perhaps as the technology matures, the chip cost will be lower and the functions will be more powerful.

However, it is difficult to achieve this, and the cycle will be very long. After all, microcontrollers have experienced decades of technological accumulation and have become very mature.

If you want to use a few years to surpass the accumulation of decades, the possibility is very small.