Jacob Beningo outlines five major embedded systems trends for 2026: AI-assisted development for custom tooling and documentation, mandatory security compliance driven by regulations like the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), platform-based engineering with tools like CMake, VS Code, and Zephyr RTOS, gradual C++ adoption alongside dominant C, and functional simulation techniques that can cut debugging time by 50%. Edge AI and tiny ML are expected to resurge as microcontrollers gain more compute power. A key concern raised is that over-reliance on AI copy-paste workflows risks eroding deep embedded expertise needed for complex hardware-software integration.
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