TI is treating bench wiring as test infrastructure instead of technician work. Its Open Source Summit Europe session showed a low-cost FPGA used as a programmable routing fabric between boards and instruments, replacing jumper changes with software commands. This software-controlled physical layer is the primitive embedded CI has been missing.
The useful design choice is software independence. The fabric sits below Zephyr, Linux, bare metal, and vendor SDKs, so the same test rack can route peripherals and fault conditions without coupling orchestration to one target stack. Teams can schedule tests overnight, reproduce a wiring state from code, and stop spending engineer time reconstructing yesterday's bench.
The next step is an open reference design with a stable control API and CI examples. A team that can reproduce TI's setup for a few hundred dollars should budget one week to automate its highest-churn bench. Lab-switch vendors that require proprietary matrices and manual configuration are the named loser.