Promoting hardware

Our hardware team has been a big factor in TippingPoint’s success. The other day I was talking with a coworker about some of my previous jobs, & about one he asked if we’d considered custom hardware. As far as I knew it hadn’t been, & I think he was right that it probably should have been. I think software engineers tend to be blind to when hardware should be considered. It just isn’t on our radar except in a few specific cases. (e.g. graphics & cryptography) Even if we know what an FPGA is, & I’d how many of us do? Especially considering how many working programmers these days aren’t even familiar with many important software concepts. But as the more general purpose engineers, who are going to be in on a project first, we really should be on the look-out for hardware opportunities. Hardware engineering needs a good marketing program to get software engineers aware of when it should be considered.