I was visiting these guys today http://www.aeroenginecontrols.com/ and they do lots of fault tolerant and fail safe stuff most of it classified and they were saying pretty much what i have been saying for years about the rise of the aggressive software nerd who sees every problem as a software problem and takes 9 years to get hardware which took 9 months to design running.
So there are companies out there which are trying to take embedded systems design and do it properly without throwing software at it. As they say software guys are ten a penny but you have to buy 100 of them to get anything working.