CEO interview: Saving engineers time and money at MikroE
Neb Matic is passionate about the productivity of the electronics industry.
“Our job is saving the engineer time through standardisation and new products,” Neb Matic of MikroE (above) tells eeNews Europe, alongside plans for a new factory and even a new programming language.
The founder of MikroElektronika (MikroE) has spent the last four years developing an AI-enabled wiki to help developers save time on their projects, making use of the 1500 different Click peripheral boards and the various development boards that the company makes at its plant on an industrial estate close to the Nikola Tesla airport in Belgrade, Serbia.
MikroE in Belgrade
This all links to the Necto development environment to automatically generate the code and documentation that developers need for their projects, and then test that code on remote boards held on WiFi-enabled racks that can be hosted anywhere in the world through its Planet Debug project.
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He is also developing a new programming language to save developers time.
“I am working on a new programming language,” he said. “Why do we need a compiler or a linker? We use the same patterns today that we used in programming languages 50 years ago. It really frustrates me. I’m frustrated by the silicon vendors who are not able to standardise things. They think they have the best tools and that everyone has to use them.”
The next stage is to construct a new building four times the size of the current one. This 25,000 square metre plant will host eight PCB assembly lines, up from the two lines today in 500 square metres and will see the company making more of its own boards and boards for more OEMs. The company will produce 250 different peripheral boards this year.
“In a few years we should have a PCB factory for 50m PCBs a year, that’s my dream. People call it a PCB factory but it makes hardware engineers,” he said.
“If you want to make a hardware engineer you need a PCB factory close by. Despite what people say, if you want a board the delivery is typically two to three weeks and if the hardware engineer doesn’t have that board at his desk he can’t do anything, it’s not like a software engineer.”
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“We need to educate people in different ways,” he said, and is applying his time saving techniques to the business. He wants to increase the output of the company by a factor of ten with the AI tools with perhaps twice the number of staff.
Despite all the innovation, standards are key for Matic for achieving this increase in productivity. “There is no Nikola Tesla, this is about standardisation,” he says, citing the favoured son of Serbia famed for his innovative technology ideas.
The two PCB lines at MikroE in Belgrade
This even applies to the board design process. Designers only work on a board design for two hours, and then move to another design. This avoids delays waiting for replies to questions.
The embedded wiki launched this month on the company’s 20th anniversary with over a million articles all automatically generated with a standard template. “It’s a huge project platform,” he says. “This has been a four year project so far so I am glad it has come to completion.”
“You can type what you want, or say you have a particular board and the AI is doing the structure and configuring the SDK. The articles and code are constructed in real time there are only two actual pages. A copilot is taking code from an existing base but this is completely different, it’s not based on existing code. That’s the power of standardisation and AI to do something useful and that’s one of our patents,“ he said.
This is just the start, he says, pointing out that Wikipedia has 55m articles. “We needed about three years to finish the structure and now we can generate a training curriculum, books and manuals. If you don’t find what you want, send us a message and we can construct it.”
All the code is hosted in the Amazon cloud on 26 servers, alongside all the systems for the operation of the company. MikroE also has five IBM servers on site to hold copies of the operation for redundancy.
He is adding Rust and Python to the Necto development tool next year, as well as Klang for a wide range of different chip architectures. “When we say we are adding Rust, it’s with the SDK with thousands of examples in the code base.”
A Planet Debug rig for remote debugging
The push to standardisation is extending to a new language for embedded computing.
“It’s completely different. I want to read 1m lines of code in 1m then I want to have 100% code without bugs. Then the third thing is that the language doesn’t give me the permission for critical code so that it cannot fail. The fourth is that everyone can use it with one day of training. It is possible,” he said.
Ultimately this will make this own developers more productive, building new boards for MikroE and for customers, and working on more projects for partners.
After that, he says he is ready to retire. That seems unlikely.
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