The Internet of Things (IoT) market isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore. It’s going crazy. Recent estimates say that the global IoT market will be worth about USD 76.97 billion in 2025, up from about USD 64.80 billion in 2024. By 2034, it will be worth about USD 356.23 billion, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of about 18.56%. Research on Precedence
Another number: by the end of 2024, there will be about 18.8 billion connected IoT devices around the world. By 2030, that number is expected to grow to about 40 billion. IoT Analytics
This means that demand is going up. All of these things are getting bigger: devices, apps, data, and connectivity. You need strong foundations, though, to ride that wave and make IoT not only bigger but also better, more reliable, more secure, and more efficient. That’s where embedded product engineering comes in.
What is Embedded Product Engineering in IoT
When we talk about IoT product engineering, We’re talking about the whole process of designing, building, testing, and keeping IoT devices and systems running. It includes things like hardware, firmware, software, connectivity, UI/UX, cloud/backend, data analytics, and more.
Embedded product engineering is the part that makes the devices themselves, which are called embedded systems. This includes things like microcontrollers or microprocessors, sensors and actuators, firmware, power management, and real-time behavior.
Then there’s electronic product engineering, which includes designing the PCBs and circuits, picking the right parts, and dealing with issues like size, cost, thermal, and EMI (electromagnetic interference). Software product engineering includes the backend, middleware, firmware, and apps. Digital engineering is often thought of as using digital tools, such as simulation, model-based design, and digital twins, to speed up and improve design and verification, reduce down on errors, and make changes more quickly.
What Are Embedded Systems?
To make things clear, let’s break this down:
Embedded systems are computer systems that are built into other devices. These aren’t general-purpose computers; they’re computers that are designed to do specific things. Your smart thermostat, pacemaker, and factory robot sensor module are all examples.
They usually have a microcontroller (or microprocessor/SoC), sensors, actuators (things that respond physically), and software (firmware) that controls how they work. There are often limits, like low power, limited memory and processing, real-time needs, environmental durability, and cost.
IoT connects many devices, so these systems also need to be able to handle things like security, communication, and data preprocessing.
Role of Embedded Systems in IoT
This is where embedded product engineering becomes very important for the growth of the Internet of Things. These are the jobs that embedded systems do:
1. Putting together sensors: The embedded system needs to connect to sensors (like temperature, motion, humidity, pressure, etc.), gather data, and sometimes process it (filter, normalize) before sending it on. Bad sensor integration (latency, noise, and calibration problems) makes the device work poorly.
2.Communication: Devices talk to each other and/or to the cloud. Embedded product engineering decides which communication protocols to use, such as wired, WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, LoRa, NB-IoT, and others, and makes sure they work well and reliably. Handling connectivity, reliability, and latency, even when the connection is slow or the bandwidth is low.
3. Data Processing (on-device or edge): Before sending data to the cloud, embedded systems often filter, normalize, and aggregate it, and sometimes even make decisions on the spot. This saves bandwidth, lowers latency, protects privacy, and makes things more responsive.
4.Security: Devices are at risk because of insecure firmware, weak encryption, poor authorization, and hardware flaws. Embedded engineering needs to make sure that secure boot, encryption, access control, and firmware update mechanisms are all built in.
5. Managing Power: A lot of IoT devices get their power from batteries or by collecting energy. Low power modes, wake-sleep cycles, efficient sensors, power budgets, and optimizing hardware and firmware together are all parts of embedded product engineering that make sure power is used efficiently.
6. Performance in Real Time and Reliability: Timing and reliability are very important for many IoT applications, such as in industry, medicine, and cars. Embedded systems have to make sure that tasks are done on time, that failure modes are handled, that they last a long time, and that they can handle different environments.
Why Embedded Product Engineering is Key for IoT Growth
In short, this means that IoT can’t get better or reach more people without strong embedded product engineering. Here are the main reasons:
1. Quality and Scalability: You can’t afford high failure rates or device recalls as the number of connected devices grows (from about 18.8 billion now to about 40 billion by 2030). Embedded engineering makes sure that hardware and firmware are reliable, which means fewer failures and longer life. That saves money and builds trust.
2. Cost-Effectiveness: Embedded engineering helps keep costs down at the component, design, and manufacturing levels. Choosing the right microcontrollers, optimizing power, reducing the number of parts, and designing for manufacturability all lower the cost of each unit. Lower prices mean more devices in more places, especially in markets where price is important.
3. Faster Time to Market: You can launch faster if you design the hardware + firmware + testing + + manufacturability all well. If you don’t include all the necessary features or design something poorly at the beginning, you’ll have to wait longer later. Digital engineering (like simulations and prototyping) helps find problems early on.
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4. Limits on energy and power: A lot of IoT devices are battery-powered or work from a distance. If embedded product engineering doesn’t take power into account, the device will break down or the cost of maintenance will skyrocket. Good embedded design makes batteries last longer, cuts down on maintenance, and makes it possible to use them in farming, environmental monitoring, and other areas.
5. Security and Trust: People want to hack IoT devices. Breaches of security not only cost money, but they also make people less trusting of IoT in general. Embedded product engineering makes it harder to add secure features later on by building in things like device identity, secure firmware updates, and encryption.
6. Regulation, Compliance, Safety: In fields like medicine, cars, and industry, devices must meet standards and regulations for safety, EMC, and functional safety, among other things. Embedded product engineering makes sure that everything is up to code. Devices can’t be legally or safely used without it.
7. Innovation Enabler: Embedded engineering is very important for many new IoT features, such as edge computing, AI inference on devices, energy harvesting, and smarter sensors. This means that what embedded systems can do will have a bigger and bigger effect on new ideas in the Internet of Things.
Interplay with Other Engineering Areas
It’s not just embedded. There are many different kinds of engineering that are important, such as software product engineering (cloud, apps, analytics), electronic product engineering (PCB design, component work), and digital engineering (model-based design, simulation, digital twins). All of these things are connected by IoT product engineering.
Here’s how they work together:
- Electronic engineers choose parts and design circuits; embedded engineers write firmware; software engineers make connections to the cloud and dashboards; digital engineering helps simulate the whole system so there are no surprises; all of these people working together makes better products.
- Problems with electronic design can cause problems that software can’t fix, like bad SNR or bad analog design. Similarly, bad firmware or software can ruin what good hardware can do.
Use Cases: Industry + Examples
Here are some concrete instances of how embedded product engineering is making or will make a big difference:
| Industry | Example | What Embedded Engineering Enables |
| Industrial Automation / Manufacturing | Predictive maintenance sensors on machines | Embedded systems detect vibration, heat, pressure; do on-device filtering and anomaly detection; send alerts. Power constraints, harsh environment, safety critical systems. |
| Agriculture / Precision Farming | Soil moisture sensors, automated irrigation | Devices often battery powered, exposed to weather; firmware has to cope with low power, sleep modes; sensor accuracy; communication often via low bandwidth networks e.g LoRa or NB-IoT. |
| Healthcare | Wearable health monitors; remote patient monitoring | Embedded systems must be reliable, safe, power efficient; must manage secure firmware updates; often low latency; work under regulatory standards. |
| Smart Homes / Buildings | Smart thermostats, energy management, security systems | Embedded systems integrate sensors, understand local conditions, perhaps even do some automation locally without cloud; need secure communication; efficient power usage. |
| Transportation / Automotive | Telematics, fleet tracking, autonomous sensors | Embedded engineering for ruggedness, highly reliable communication, latency, safety, and regulatory safety (functional safety, ISO standards). |
Industry
Industrial Automation / Manufacturing
Example
Predictive maintenance sensors on machines
What Embedded Engineering Enables
Embedded systems detect vibration, heat, pressure; do on-device filtering and anomaly detection; send alerts. Power constraints, harsh environment, safety critical systems.
Industry
Agriculture / Precision Farming
Example
Soil moisture sensors, automated irrigation
What Embedded Engineering Enables
Devices often battery powered, exposed to weather; firmware has to cope with low power, sleep modes; sensor accuracy; communication often via low bandwidth networks e.g LoRa or NB-IoT.
Industry
Healthcare
Example
Wearable health monitors; remote patient monitoring
What Embedded Engineering Enables
Embedded systems must be reliable, safe, power efficient; must manage secure firmware updates; often low latency; work under regulatory standards.
Industry
Smart Homes / Buildings
Example
Smart thermostats, energy management, security systems
What Embedded Engineering Enables
Embedded systems integrate sensors, understand local conditions, perhaps even do some automation locally without cloud; need secure communication; efficient power usage.
Industry
Transportation / Automotive
Example
Telematics, fleet tracking, autonomous sensors
What Embedded Engineering Enables
Embedded engineering for ruggedness, highly reliable communication, latency, safety, and regulatory safety (functional safety, ISO standards).
These examples show that the quality of embedded product engineering has a direct effect on the success or failure of IoT use cases.
Challenges With Embedded Systems & How Good Engineering Solves Them
Let’s talk about challenges before I finish (because it’s not just important to know why embedded matters, but also what problems need to be solved). Good engineering takes care of these things.
1. Limitations on Power and Energy: There are a lot of battery-powered devices in remote areas that might be charged by solar power. When firmware isn’t working right, it uses too much idle current, has a bad power architecture, and the battery life goes down.
Solution: Use low-power microcontrollers, carefully design sleep and wake modes, use power gating, choose the right components, collect energy, and improve communication bursts versus idle time.
2. Security: Weaknesses in hardware (like flash that isn’t protected), bugs in firmware, insecure over-the-air (OTA) updates, and weak encryption.
Solution: Secure boot, firmware that is encrypted, updates that are signed, a hardware root of trust, and regular security audits.
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3. Reliability and Real-Time: Some applications, like those in industry, cars, and medicine, need to behave in a predictable way. Not meeting deadlines or making mistakes can have big effects.
Solution: Real-time OS, thorough testing, fault tolerance, redundancy, simulation and modeling, and digital engineering to check edge cases are all parts of the solution.
4. Trade-offs between cost and performance: You want performance, but it costs money, power, and time. If you give too many details, you could lose money; if you don’t give enough, the product could fail or the user experience could be bad.
Solution: carefully choosing components, making prototypes over and over again, balancing the minimum viable features, using a modular architecture, and reusing code.
5. Interoperability and Scalability: Devices from different vendors, using different protocols and having different lifecycles; scaling from hundreds to millions; managing firmware updates and connectivity across geographies.
Use standard communication protocols; design firmware updates to happen over the air; make devices that are modular and can be upgraded; make sure device identity and tokenization; and coordinate cloud firmware.
6. Environmental Limits and Making: Extreme heat, cold, moisture, and mechanical stress; then defects in mass production; PCB and electronic design for manufacturability.
Solution: strong design, lowering the power of components, testing in different environments, thermal design, EMC/EMI compliance, designing for manufacturability, and a strong supply chain.
What This Really Means for Companies & Product Teams
If your products wants to do well in the IoT space, you need to make embedded product engineering a part of your long-term plans. Here’s what teams need to do:
- Put money into embedded engineering resources on (hardware + firmware). Don’t leave it as an extra.
- Use digital engineering tools like simulations, model-based design, prototyping, and digital twins to find problems before they happen in real life.
- Make security a top priority from the start. Everything, from the device’s identity to OTA updates and secure boot.
- Think about power when you design, both in hardware and firmware. Devices that last longer are less likely to break down and are easier to fix.
- Think about how firmware and electronics will grow: how to update a lot of devices, versioning, the supply chain, and the fact that parts will become obsolete.
- Collaboration across fields: embedded engineers, electronic engineers, software/back-end engineers, UX, quality assurance, and others need to all speak the same language from the start, It means sourcing the right partner for your product development.
Use Case: IoT in Agriculture
Here’s an example of how embedded product engineering works in agriculture:
Think about a large farm in a semi-arid area that has a precise irrigation system. The goal is to make the best use of water, keep an eye on soil moisture, temperature, and light, and automate watering.
What this needs:
- Sensors: Soil moisture, temperature, and possibly nutrient sensors are examples of sensors.
- Embedded device: needs to run on batteries or solar power and have low power cycles. Most of the time, sleep, wake up, measure, and send data over a low-power network like LoRa or NB-IoT.
- Local processing: filter out occasional outliers; maybe find out if moisture is below a certain level and start irrigation right away without going to the cloud (quick response).
- Communication: maybe a gateway or hub that collects data and sends it to the cloud. It needs to be able to handle connections that aren’t always there.
- Security: device credentials, stop spoofing (someone faking moisture), and make sure the firmware is safe so there are no backdoors.
- Durability: the device must be able to handle heat, moisture, and dust; the enclosure must be tough; the PCB may need to be conformal coated; and the connectors must be sealed.
- Over-the-air firmware updates: Let you add fixes and features without having to go to each device in person.
This system works reliably for years with little maintenance, is cost-effective, and saves measurable amounts of water if the embedded product engineering is done well. If not, sensors drift, devices stop working, data is lost, and farmers lose faith.
This is just one of many cases where embedded engineering is not an option; it is necessary.
Conclusion
We at SiliconSignals believe that embedded product engineering is the key to real IoT growth. We don’t just connect devices; we also make systems that are safe, reliable, energy-efficient, and built to last. We help companies turn their IoT ideas into products that are ready for the market by bringing together all the parts, from electronic product engineering to software product engineering to digital engineering.
This means that our team makes sure the embedded foundation is strong enough for your IoT products to grow with confidence, whether you’re making smart home devices, industrial automation solutions, healthcare systems, or precision agriculture tools.
Silicon Signals is the company to work with if you want to make IoT product engineering that not only connect but also work.