Noah Pacik-Nelson
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BootLoop just won Best in Show for Test and Measurement at embedded world 2026. I’m really excited and proud of the team for what we’ve built.
The Embedded Computing Design editorial team assesses every entry on Design Excellence, Relative Performance, and Market Impact, and the submissions pool has been getting bigger every year.
If you're not familiar with us yet: BootLoop is an AI-powered development platform that writes firmware and tests it directly on your hardware. It compiles against your toolchain, flashes your board, and then uses test equipment to fully exercise your code on the hardware it was designed for..
Why Test and Measurement matters to us
This award category is the one we would have picked for ourselves. The entire point of BootLoop is that firmware can't be called complete until it's been rigorously validated on hardware (or in a very good simulation). Beyond that, LLMs are only as powerful as their understanding of the problem at hand. For us, testing and measurement isn’t just about verification, it’s about giving the agent the information needed to solve not just the easy problems, but the hard ones - power consumption, ISR issues, race conditions and more. .
Testing is the backbone of the platform. Yes, the agent also ingests your datasheets, schematics, and Altium projects to understand your hardware before it starts - but it also understands the bench it’s testing against. It understands when to use a debugger, when to use an oscilloscope, when to use a logic analyzer, and what their limitations are. Whenever it tests on your hardware, you can codify that into a deterministic test that runs the exact same way over and over again.
If you come by the booth, you’ll see it running live - building code and testing it itself on hardware directly in front of you.
What this means for the industry
The firmware layer is becoming the bottleneck for the entire embedded industry. Hardware gets more capable every year. The software abstractions above firmware keep maturing. But the work of actually writing, testing, and debugging the code that makes hardware do what it's supposed to do is still largely manual, painfully slow, and dependent on a shrinking pool of engineers who know how to do it.
80% of embedded engineering job postings go unfilled for months. The teams that do have engineers are stretched across more architectures, more toolchains, more compliance requirements, and more product complexity than ever before. Something has to give.
We started BootLoop because we kept seeing the same thing: hard-working, high-velocity teams felt like they needed to choose between shipping fast and testing thoroughly. That only made sense when there weren't better options. There are better options now. The fact that this award came from the Test and Measurement category specifically tells us the industry is starting to think about this the same way we do.
Come see it for yourself
We're in booth 5-121 for all three days of embedded world, right next to the RISC-V booth. Chris and I are running live demos of agentic debugging and one-click driver generation on real hardware throughout the show.
If you're an engineer dealing with any of the challenges above, or a leader trying to figure out how to ship firmware faster without tripling your headcount, come say hi. We'd love to show you what we've been building.
And if you just want to grab a coffee and talk about the state of firmware development, we're genuinely up for that too.
Book a meeting with us or just swing by the booth.
See you in Nuremberg.
-- Noah and Chris