First? Research hardware engineer

I'm sure I'm not the first research hardware engineer, but at least the first one on this website.

I've been at the University of Southampton since 2014 when I started my Bachelors in Electronics Engineering, and then onto a PhD in semiconductor material optimisation. For the past 2 years I have been working with John Darlington at SoC Labs, where I do a lot of digital and analog hardware design. 

A significant amount of this work is what you may call enabling research. I am designing SoC reference designs and IP blocks needed for these designs. For instance, I have been helping create a microcontroller SoC reference design called NanoSoC. Within this I’ve also created a QSPI controller to enable reading/writing to off chip memory. This in itself is a necessary block for the betterment of the project but is not novel or publishable work. 

Similarly to work that has been done with the Research Software Engineer community, tasks that aren’t published in papers or conferences should still be recognised and be able to be leveraged in forwarding an academic career. I think through formalisation of a role as a Research Hardware Engineer and through activities like the hidden REF, will have a huge positive impact on hardware engineers in academia.