On the other hand, there aren't many competitors that are better in terms of accessibility. Sigh. Implementing embedded devices with any sorts of "smarts" beyond some Atmel uC from scratch is a pain - one has to go with ready-made modules (ESPxx, Raspberry Pi compute module, COMexpress) to not go insane.
And it's not just the data sheets where you will run into issues (at least, usually you can find them somewhere pirated to get started). Design guides, layouting rules and certifications are a way bigger pain point... looking at you Thunderbolt.
And when you finally have your first PCB version ready, you'll soon find out that any components more intelligent than a couple transistors have sometimes ridiculous minimum order quantities. Let's take a SI2494 56k modem chip... 45$ apiece at a MOQ of 43 - which means if you want one or two you'll have to shell out about 2k $! And to add insult to injury, it's apparently still profitable to sell them for under 9$ at high quantities. This fucking rip-off is the reason why many hobbyist electronic projects are restricted to using dumbass components.
edit: I totally forgot about the software side with embedded SoCs. Basically, to boot Linux or anything else on a SoC you need firmware blobs (e.g. for the GPU or wireless radio parts) and lots of custom code (e.g. to bootstrap clocks, memory, IO). Usually the SoC vendors have an ancient fork of a Linux kernel and u-boot in which over each new chipset there gets ever more custom cruft and (often shoddily) backported stuff from newer kernels. This conglomerate is called "board support package" or BSP - and is, despite consisting of open source code, often guarded as heavily by NDAs as the data sheets.
Sometimes, especially for Mediatek stuff, these BSPs get leaked on Github... and it's always a wild ride looking into them. It's no surprise that upstream Linux doesn't have the support for whatever specific CPU... because the quality of the code is more often than not so hardcore rotten that it's a wonder you don't hear every day about some compromised IoT device.
Hope that more open hardware will come out over time.
Regulation is out of any question, both in the US and the EU. While there may be some hard-won progress in the "right to repair" fights recently, the needs of hobbyist electronics people aren't on any politician's radar and I doubt that will change soon (even if easier access to high quality electronics could unleash so much potential for innovation!).
Market pressure is out of the question too, simply because the volumes that us hobbyists order are too small. For what it's worth I'd pay a couple hundred bucks for an 1:1 q&a/consulting session with an expert from a semiconductor or other company for my hobby projects and I'd also accept a reasonable "small volume handling/shipping fee" for getting my hands on ten chips... but I'm the utter minority of hobbyists who can actually afford that for a project that won't bring any profit. Corporate entities however who are going to sell thousands or orders of magnitude more units of some random gizmo can afford putting up six figures upfront anyway... so they have no incentive either to pressure vendors into providing better service.
Custom boards are a thing already, you can go up to three layers in an amateur/hobbyist setting AFAIK, but that won't help you much when dealing with high-frequency stuff or very fine pitch settings as the thickness and other parameters will vary across the board. Many countries already have somewhat cheap-ish "rapid prototype PCB" shops, some even do assembly for you. That's good enough even for most HF stuff.
Have said hobbyists pay an appropriate amount of money. If an expert of TI can help me get started I'd find something like 100-200€/h reasonable.
> or buying small quantities to poke around and copy IP
Anyone wanting to steal IP for profit can already do so, most datasheets are available on pirate sites.
However the calculation has nothing to do with what guessing a reasonable hourly rate.
The issue is whether someone with the expertise to do this would benefit the company and their own career more doing something other than a tech support role.
Even assuming 50% overhead something just short of 200k remains. I agree, for the US it may be on the lower end of the scale (given the ridiculous costs of housing and healthcare), but Europe or Asia? Way more than enough.
> The issue is whether someone with the expertise to do this would benefit the company and their own career more doing something other than a tech support role.
At least in my experience it is definitely good for people to spend time directly with customers. I agree it may not be worthwile for a chip developer or a documentation writer to spend their full time on doing support - but a set amount of time, say four or eight hours a week? That's direct, unfiltered input from the customers where the documentation is either missing, unclear or buggy.
Generic questions ("which combination of chips to choose if I have an USB-C female receptacle and want to provide bidirectional PD, bidirectional DisplayPort and USB3.2 over it") / 1:1 tutoring like "how do I best route a PCI-E differential lane pair", "how to properly calculate trace widths for said lanes given fab house X's stack specifications" can be directed to less specialist / sales staff or to a partner PCB design house.
I agree that direct experience with customers is good for many engineers. It is definitely not good for all engineers.
However there is a huge difference between professional customers and hobbyists.
You are now taking about a multi-tiered support organization.
You personally may be willing to spend 200 euros per hour for access to such an organization.
The question is, are there enough customers like you to justify millions of Euros in investment to build such an organization.
Starting from the hourly rate you personally think engineers should be paid gives exactly zero information about the demand, and therefore zero information about whether such a rate is meaningful.
Intel has ME/AMT, and requires an opaque, PK-signed-and-only-intel-and-NSA-have-the-key blob. AMD is the same with PSP.
I'm not up to date, there might be a RISC-V core available today that is blob free, but in 2012 when RasPi was introduced I wasn't aware of anything blobless.
But why do you trust that the silicon doesn't have any backdoors more than you trust the blob? We know for a fact that Intel puts one into the silicon, and that it takes significant reverse engineering to turn most of it off (it's not clear if all of it can be turned off at all) see e.g. https://hackaday.com/2020/06/16/disable-intels-backdoor-on-m...
https://forums.puri.sm/t/the-i-mx8-cannot-be-deblobbed-nxp-s...