Embedded designs continue to grow in complexity, and yet, embedded designs are becoming a mainstay in nearly every design – even systems that demand the highest quality, such as medical, automotive, and industrial equipment. Tim Cummins comments on the trend “by buyers to simply allocate the risks of failure to their suppliers through broad-brush application of ‘burdensome’ terms, such as onerous liability and indemnity provisions.” By definition, embedded designs are not the end device, so they are used by someone else in their final device – thus embedded developers always find themselves in the position of supplier to some end device manufacturer.
I find the request for onerous liability and indemnity provisions are not limited to embedded designs where there is the potential for significant unknowns, but also in more mundane spaces such as writing articles. My background in aerospace taught me that unlimited liabilities are never worth agreeing to. In fact, it is better to avoid indemnity and liability clauses where possible, but that kind of buyer seems to be a rarer and rarer beast to find. An approach I have taken is to explicitly describe and limit what liabilities I am willing to take on in a contract – specifically what I will warrant and guarantee about the product I deliver to the customer.
Warranties may explicitly identify limits for expecting the subsystem or product to work as specified – which means there is a growing amount of resources expended on specifying what the system is not designed to handle. Is this a best practice approach? What does your team do to address a buyer’s risk and liability concerns for your embedded components?
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