I don' t think there are any GOOD firmware engineers who don't have an understanding of the world outside their FPGAs (and, thus, by your definition, they are electronic engineers). Otherwise, they are software engineers.
And I would have to disagree with my esteemed colleague, BradtheRad. Power engineers, HVAC engineers, etc. are NOT electronic engineers; they are electrical engineers. Electronics deals with active components.
You are not the first to consider firmware engineer the guy who develop on FPGAs. To me that is digital design, using FPGAs rather than ASICs. Firmware (as having worked in that field for few time), I always considered to be embedded software, down to register programming. The boundary between software and firmware may vary from person to person, but I never included HDL stuff in this booundary.
There is a lot of crossover between ASIC design and Firmware design. The HDL is pretty similar, but the layout is different. You have more liberties with ASIC in positioning logic, whereas FPGA resources are fixed. This can cause timing issues you might not see in ASIC as you have more control of the place and route. If you can write HDL for FPGAs, you can write HDL for ASICs. There is little in common with software.
I would not call this firmware, since I see the term firmware mainly for embedded software, i.e. C/C++, not for HDL.
Despite of different design methodologies used and principle distinction between programming and hardware description language, it's quite common to talk of microcontroller and FPGA firmware, both developed in the software design team.
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