VDC Research: Embedded Microprocessor, Board & Systems Market Blog

New Media, New Opportunities - Extending the Value Proposition of Media Servers

The rampant adoption of all-IP networking infrastructures and continual advances in consumer electronics have allowed media content and services to evolve in tandem. Consumer requirements are intensifying with expectations of HD video, high data speeds, and superior audio quality – and will deepen with new, rapidly growing applications such as video conferencing and unified collaboration. The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture has guided leading media server vendors to offer powerful and flexible hardware capable of supporting various formats and applications. For hardware vendors to compete in this increasingly competitive market, though, they must provide sufficient support and exemplary added-value in their products and solutions.

Communication service providers (CSPs) and other media providers are ditching early proprietary platforms in favor of new scalable and modular open systems to harness several economic and technological benefits. Today, most leading media server vendors, including HP, IBM and Radisys, offer server architectures capable of easily scaling out to current and future application requirements. Though performance, cost, and reliability are always top priorities to solution investments, vendors need to incorporate a variety of value-adds to influence OEMs’ selection of embedded hardware to manage media and data content.

First, OEMs must support vast application/technical formats and standards, and clearly communicate them to prospective clients. Outside of processing power and memory/storage capacity, media providers want to know about codec/format support, RAID support, available operating systems, support for industry standards, and application limits (such as maximum concurrent video feeds) without having to dive through spec sheets. Radisys goes one step further and lists “revenue generating applications” directly on product pages clearly outlining the potential capabilities of given embedded hardware. The broader the support, the greater the addressable market.

Software is a critical area that OEMs can drive further value and revenues from media server hardware, but one with extensively more competition from ISVs and other hardware vendors. Alcatel-Lucent’s Centralized Operations Manager, for instance, is an element management system that consolidates and simplifies IMS and next-generation network management functions. Alternatively, ISVs tend to stick with application-specific solutions. Though in-house software development may be outside the scope of some current vendors, partnerships should be explored to satisfy this important application criterion.

Last, but certainly not least, technical documents and training offer untold ease-of-mind to end users when evaluating media-processing solutions. IBM offers extensive training, available online and on-site, spanning their broad portfolio of media management solutions and supported applications. Training, as is the case with IBM, can be developed into a formidable revenue stream and be a tremendous opportunity to strengthen brand loyalty among customers.

At the Design West – Embedded Systems Conference 2013 – Part 2

In this blog we will continue to provide a few more highlights from the suppliers we spoke to at the 2013 DESIGN WEST / Embedded Systems Conference that was held last week in San Jose.

Small Form Factor Motherboards: At the VersaLogic booth we were shown several of their new small form factor motherboards, including the EBX format Copperhead that is powered by an Intel i7 processor and can support up to 3 independent displays. We also saw their COM Express Mini format Falcon and EPIC format Iguana that are powered by Intel Atom processors. The Iguana boards have a Mini PCIe card socket that allows an OEM to round out its configuration with a wide array of connectivity, storage, and other options. All of the Versalogic products we saw at the show were designed for extremely high reliability in operating temperatures that extend from -40C to +85C, and many of them can be ordered in Class 3 assembly versions for mission critical applications.

Computers-on-Modules (COMs): At the congatec booth we saw the variety of COM product lines they offer including Qseven, COM Express, ETX, and XTX. If customers require high power COMs in passive cooling configurations, congatec has patented spring loaded heatspreader thermal interfaces that pull heat away from chipset components and transfer it to the edge of the module. Depending on the OEM application, many of the congatec Qseven products can be ordered with x86 processors from AMD and Intel or ARM processors from Freescale.

Development Platforms: At the ST Micro booth we visited with Ayla Networks who were demonstrating their proof-of-concept secure M2M cloud connectivity solutions with the STM32 F3 evaluation platforms representing connectivity targets. We expect to hear more from Ayla in the future, and you will likely be reading about them in our blog. At the Texas Instruments booth we were shown the new BeagleBoard Black open-source development platform. This impressive unit sells for only $45, and has a 1 GHz ARM A8 processor, 512MB of DDR3 RAM memory, and an on-board HDMI. The BeagleBoard can be expanded for multiple applications by using BeagleBone “capes”. There were multiple applications highlighted, including a remotely controlled electro-mechanical spider that had been fabricated using 3D printed parts.

Ultra Low Power MCUs: We noted that ST Micro had won an EE Times / EDN ACE Award for its Fully-Depleted Silicon-on-Insulator (FD-SOI) technology that allows devices to run using 20 – 50% less power. On a similar note, Renesas was demonstrating the power sipping ability of its RX111 group of MCUs that can wake up in 4.8us from a sleep mode, where it only consumes 350nA. In addition, the RX111 has 6 safety functions to verify/ensure that the device and supporting circuitry are working properly.

Industrial SATA III SSD: The VDC team met with Innodisc and learned about their new SATA III line of Flash Storage Products targeted at embedded applications in the industrial market.  These Innodisc products use arrays of lower-cost Multi-Layer Cell (MLC) memory chips to duplicate Single-Layer Cell performance and reliability at a significantly lower price point.

Embedded Certainty: At the XMOS booth we learned about their series of MCUs that were designed to remove uncertainty from critical applications. This means that programs can be developed where the signal timing is completely predictable. Roughly stated, the XMOS MCU have removed I/O layers and other elements that create signal latency or processing variables that can affect timing. There are many applications such as digital audio and collision avoidance that can benefit from MCUs with predictable timing.

Embedded Motherboards: As the VDC EHW team is currently in the midst of our supply-side coverage of the embedded motherboard market, we were particularly interested in seeing the two new SuperMicro X9DR products. Both of these units were extremely powerful and can be used in applications that require power-efficient processing of high volumes of data. SuperMicro also sells its products into the traditional IT space and, as such, has some system options that can be attractive to OEMs supporting mission critical applications. These include built in Uninterruptible Power Supply and automatic flash memory backup of system RAM and CPU processes in the event of a power outage.

Stay tuned for part 3 where we will wrap up our observations from the 2013 Design West show. 

M2M can Authenticate Actionable Intelligence for Hospitality Industry

During a recent conversation at VDC, the topic turned to a problem often seen by users of travel and restaurant advisor sites. It is often difficult to determine legitimate user ratings from those that were created by employees or competitors of the venue in question. We believe that Google, Apple, or another industry participant could mitigate this problem by using an M2M architecture solution. Here is how it would work:

 

The persons who would want to be authenticated reviewers of hospitality venues would register at a cloud-based site. The mobile devices they carry would be linked to their profile. The reviewers would have to opt-in to allow GPS and Wi-Fi location based tracking and logging.

If the reviewer wishes to submit a rating for a venue they log into the cloud-based application. The cloud based application verifies that the location data from the reviewer’s mobile device matches the pattern of a legitimate customer. If the verification passes, the rating and commentary are accepted. The identity of the reviewer could be obscured if needed but, if their reviews were found to be questionable, they could be disqualified in the future.  It’s not foolproof, but it’s better than what many of these rating sites have today.

At the Design West – Embedded Systems Conference 2013 – Part 1 the Embeddy

Last week, while attending the 2013 DESIGN West/Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose we presented the VDC Research Embeddy Award for the best new embedded hardware product. As part of the selection process the VDC Embedded Hardware team met with more than 30 companies to discuss product announcements and a variety of industry trends impacting the embedded hardware market today. Before we get to the award winner, we will start with a few highlights from some of the suppliers we spoke to at the show.

Connectivity enhanced Microcontrollers: Microchip usually makes several significant embedded hardware announcements at DW/ESC shows and this year was no exception.  VDC was given a detailed briefing on several new connectivity modules that OEMs can use for many applications. If the OEM's product already has a computing element, the new microchip modules are designed to easily integrate the needed Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, ZigBee, MiWi, and/or proprietary network types. If the OEM’s engineers have not settled on a processing element to interface with sensors or product components they might consider the modules that include integrated MCUs. The good news for OEMs is that the selection of any of these Microchip modules will likely eliminate product testing for overall FCC compliance and production test and calibration. Microchip demonstrated how a lighting OEM might integrate these new products in a way that would enable lighting products to be controlled in M2M applications including network based portals and authenticated mobile devices.

Secure M2M: Our next stop at the show was with Icon Labs and they were highlighting a new barrier/firewall device that was well suited for supporting M2M on legacy equipment in industrial applications. The unit we saw was targeted for a market price of ~$1K but included many security elements using Intel Atom processing and embedded software from Icon Labs’ partners including Wind River, ZiLog, McAfee, and Green Hills.

New Rugged Handheld Devices: At our next stop, the VDC EHW team was greeted by the enthusiastic ADLINK team and they had every right to be that way. There were a number of interesting products in many categories.  We were particularly interested in ADLINK’s foray into the enterprise handheld device market with the IMX-9000 which includes barcode reading capability, multiple connectivity protocols all contained in a stylish but rugged enclosure that is said to withstand IP67 and 1.5M drop tests. While at the ADLINK booth, we saw the new Advanced TCA processor blade. The new aTCA-9300 is well suited for media delivery platforms because of the need for scalable processing to deliver content in the needed forms and formats for the transmission and end use by the target device.

Media Processing: As a bit of background, it is not feasible to store content in all forms and formats suitable for delivery to, and use by, the huge numbers of things used to view them. This means that content has to be converted on the fly and that means there is a huge need for embedded processing products to perform these tasks.

ASICs and FPGAs: We received updates on the latest developments in the world of ASICs and FPGAs. We spoke with Altera who divides the majority of the FPGA market with Xilinx.  Altera  provided an update on the SoC FPGA line that was introduced in late 2011. The Cyclone V and Arria V FPGAs incorporate ARM CPU cores with FPGAs to allow OEMs to develop more powerful and flexible product designs while economizing on needed circuit board space.  One advantage that FPGAs normally have over ASICS is that they take less time to design and can be brought into production faster. If design issues are discovered at later stages, they can be corrected faster and at lower cost. The Altera inclusion of ARM cores allows OEM engineers to leverage many development tools that are available for ARM and that theoretically increases the advantages over traditional ASIC processes.

On the ASIC side, we received a briefing by Triad Semiconductor on their ViaASICs  and the associated development toolset ViaDesigner. The goals of these two products is to eliminate the time-to-market and development cost advantages of FPGA products over ASICs. The process works like this. In the semiconductor fab, the wafers are started and arrays of circuits and functional blocks are laid down but not configured and interconnected. These are then stocked until needed. An OEM engineer then uses the development tool that determines how the Triad chip will be configured. The data from that tool is sent to the fab and they create the mask(s) needed to for the next steps in the wafer creation process. The next steps lay down the layers needed for connecting the functional blocks creating a finished product.

New SBCs: Advantech highlighted a new compact design Single Board Computer (SBC) called the MIO-5290 that can be ordered with 3^rd Gen Intel i3 or i7 processors. With its ability to drive 3 independent displays with intense graphics, and the availability to add various I/O modules to customize the product, the MIO-5290 is well suited for many applications such as intelligent signage. The VDC team identified the MIO as one of the finalists in the Embeddy Award selection process.

Another finalist in the Embeddy Award selection process was WinSystems SBC35C series of products that utilize the 800 Mhz Freescale  i.MX 6Q Industrial Processor. There were several things that impressed us. The SBC35C board layout was very well thought out with industrial bus connections all on one side and the other needed connections on the other. The SBC35C can be run with Power over Ethernet (PoE) or a single DC source. The last thing that impressed us was the fact that the WinSystems team was showing their product the proper respect by handling the demo SBC with an anti-static bag. If they do that on the show floor, you can expect that their production and test process is also using similar precautions.

2013 Hardware Embeddy Winner: And now, without further ado, the winner of the VDC Hardware Embeddy award for the 2013 Design West / ESC show was AMD for their new G-Series family of SoC processors that we believe will make a big impact in the embedded hardware market.

Embedded Sensing & M2M Enable Advanced Efficient Agriculture

The VDC embedded hardware team received a very interesting briefing from RFMicron (Austin, Texas) on an IC component aimed at solving a problem seen with passive RFID tags. In addition to increasing the performance of the RFID tag, the new chip (called Magnus) actually allows the tag to perform additional functions and, as a result, we believe that this product has many potential M2M applications.

Here is a bit of background. Passive RFID tags do not contain any power source of their own. When stimulated by the correct RF signal, they chirp back data that is stored on or measured by the tag at that moment. Because a passive RFID tag is essentially using the received energy to transmit the return signal the tuning between the tag electronics and antenna have to be near perfect. One thing that can interfere with a passive RFID tag’s performance is moisture. The new Magnus chip enables the passive RFID tag to adjust for moisture to maintain optimal operation. That, by itself, is significant because it allows objects that are in sub-optimal conditions (e.g. wet) to be monitored wirelessly at greater distances. As a result M2M applications could be deployed over extremely long periods of time without needing any power source on the individual assets. What made this new component really interesting is that moisture data from the component could be transmitted by the tag along with the stored ID number. In our opinion, passive RFID tags with this component could be a key piece in an M2M optimized agricultural operation. Here is how it would work:

VDC’s View of M2M Enabled Agriculture using Passive RFID Moisture Detection

1.)    During planting process, the farm equipment inserts the RFID tags at given intervals along with the seeds. The embedded computer on the farm equipment logs and transmits the tag’s ID number and GPS location data to the cloud.

2.)    As farm equipment pass over the fields, the RFID reader scans the sensors and the embedded computer collects the data. This allows for the creation of a economical irrigation plan. VDC pictures this as being similar to ink-jet printers in precision as opposed to pumping water and spraying for fixed intervals.

3.)    Data from the moisture sensors can be retained in the cloud to confirm that optimal irrigation was maintained.

4.)    At harvest time, data on crop yields and quality are collected and sent to the cloud.

5.)    The cloud stored data can be used for many purposes that benefit several agricultural stakeholders including:

• The farmer can optimize future crops from the lessons learned from the current one.
• The aggregated data on crop yields can be sold to the investment community for analysis and pricing of agriculture-based financial instruments.
• In the event of a crop failure, the insurance industry can verify that the farmer had followed reasonable practices before making the payout.

6.)    At the end of the process, the farmer tills over the field without having to worry about recovering sensors or their connectivity infrastructure.

What happens to the RFID tags after that?  We have to assume that most of the tags would survive for several years but they would no longer have precise location or soil depth. Although, it is possible that the tags could be recovered for future use, the cost of doing so would likely exceed their cost of approximately $1 per unit. In future growing seasons, any data received from RFID tags deployed with earlier crops would be ignored.

The connected-farm is only one of many possible M2M applications for passive RFID sensor tags. For example, the moisture detecting RFID tags could be installed inside tanks at regular intervals to detect liquid levels.  Other physical properties such as pressure or temperature could be included to increase functionality. The M2M possibilities are endless.

ALPR = Big $$ for Embedded Hardware Suppliers

An interesting opportunity for embedded hardware suppliers caught the attention of the VDC M2M Embedded Platform team. The opportunity was highlighted in a Boston Globe article this week about a local police department that equipped a cruiser with a $28K Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) unit. There were a number of eye-popping statistics starting with the fact that the unit apparently paid for itself in the first 11 days it was deployed. The ROI was accomplished from revenues generated by identifying vehicles and drivers with expired licenses, registrations, inspections, or other unpaid fines and fees. ALPRs can also be used for parking enforcement particularly in areas where civilian officials want to encourage shoppers with low cost short interval parking spaces. In this parking application, an official uses an ALPR to detect commuters and/or store workers that try to take advantage of the potential arbitrage and fine them.

Now let’s look at the $28K bundle of embedded hardware and software and speculate a bit on what is likely to be involved. The ALPR cited by the Boston Globe had the capability to read 1,800 license plates per minute and cover 4 lanes of traffic simultaneously. It can make those readings at differential speeds of up to 150 mph. This is a key factor because the unit is mounted on a cruiser as opposed to a parking or toll-taking lane where only the vehicle would be moving and the zone where the license plate would be is more predictable. Therefore there has to be a camera system capable of capturing a wide field at varying focal lengths and light conditions. The torrent of data from the camera system has to be rapidly processed to identify license plates and simultaneously perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on 4 or more plates in the field of view. Additionally, the system has to identify the state that issued the plate. This is challenging because many states like Massachusetts issue multiple types of specialty plates for sports teams and other organizations or causes. States also control costs by not replacing license plates until they practically fall apart. Therefore, it is fairly safe to say that there would be approximately $10K in optics and high performance processing inside the ALPR to accomplish the OCR function.

What happens next is important. We are going to make an assumption and it is a big one. We will assume that the ALPR generates data that supports law enforcement but this data will not be a cornerstone for court cases. This means that the raw video would not need to be compressed and stored for future reference while preserving chain of custody. For example, if the ALPR were going to be used for moving traffic or criminal violations it would need to have irrefutable video evidence that identified the driver as well as speed measurement data. Because of our limited OCR assumption, the captured data only needs to be combined with time stamps, GPS coordinates and, perhaps a few operational parameters. As a result, this limited data set would be in the order of kbytes per record as opposed to Mbytes per second for full video archiving. Even so, this still represents several thousands of dollars per ALPR unit for the additional embedded sensing, processing, storage, HMI and communication hardware.

In our estimate, the next part of the ALPR application would optimally involve cloud-based Big Data resources. The ALPR would transmit captured data in real time and processed for matches in multiple databases. The response back to the police cruiser would have to be rapid to be effective. The most effective ALPR supporting infrastructure would have to combine data from all municipalities, states, and federal agencies relevant to a particular region. Suffice it to say, the cloud-based and communication services could easily amount to several hundred dollars per month for each ALPR deployed.

The Boston Globe article stated that there were already 87 ALPRs deployed in the state with another 7 Boston area police departments adding 21 additional in the next month. Considering that Massachusetts alone has over 350 cities and towns but the entire US represents over 36,000 municipalities, the potential market for ALPRs and the embedded hardware inside them would appear to be a huge and rapidly growing opportunity.

The Next big Thing in Smart Phones is LITTLE

Last week, Samsung unveiled its latest Galaxy S4 Smartphone. The first wave of news indicated that it would be powered by Samsung’s new 8-core Exynos 5 octa processor.  This is exciting to us because it represents one of the first commercial rollouts of the ARM big.LITTLE technology.  Samsung intends to sell the Exynos 5 to other device makers as well. These types of processors although targeted for use in high-end mobile devices, may find M2M and embedded market traction as well because of the many functions that are included and the technology that balances processor speed and power consumption.

The Exynos 5 octa includes four powerful A-15 cores, each one paired with a subsidiary “energy sipping” A-7 core. The ARM technology allows seamless switching from one core to the other, depending upon the application. This heterogeneous approach allows the Exynos 5 to be as much as 70% more efficient than processors utilizing homogeneous cores.

The use of heterogeneous cores is not new, but other versions we have seen often have required some application design finesse to achieve a balance between energy conservation and performance. ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture, on the other hand, allows software developers to concentrate on the use of the four A-15 cores because the instruction sets for the A-15s and the subsidiary A-7s are the same.

Smartphones are not the only mobile products that can benefit from the big.LITTLE technology and processors such as the Exynos 5 octa. If Samsung or another supplier commit to making these military and/or industrial versions of these devices and to making them available for the extended periods of time that these markets require, we might see them make inroads in areas such as telematics M2M and/or micro unmanned platforms. These small-sized platforms have to operate autonomously for as long as possible, so power available for processing is a precious commodity. As with smartphones, loads on processing in mini unmanned and M2M platform applications can vary significantly, depending on the situation. Therefore, a 70% energy efficiency improvement might become the difference between a successful mission and one that is terminated before reaching its goal.

As this blog is posting, there is some information to suggest that the North American release of the Samsung S4 may not use the Exynos, instead using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600. There are a few possible reasons for this potential processor swap. The first being given is that US carriers are presently more receptive to Qualcomm’s cellular modem technology. We believe that it is also possible that the supply of Exynos 5 octa chips is limited because of wafer fab capacity or yields. Lastly Samsung, like many phone suppliers, keeps each product platform fresh by introducing new derivatives. These incremental upgrades can serve to keep products popular with consumers, thereby maintaining revenue margins for suppliers and cellular providers.

Is Yahoo’s Collaboration Strategy Flawed? M2M & People Play Key Roles

Based on my experience, there is a point to Marissa Meyer’s new policy at Yahoo. Collaboration can indeed happen when people work in a same physical area. When I worked as a product support engineer back in the late 90’s, our team would take calls from field engineers as the second tier of customer support. There was countless times where the team members would overhear a conversation from a person on a call and offer assistance because they had a good idea about what the problem was. If anything, the challenge back then was proving to people that collaboration could happen without everyone in the same space.

In 2001, I was part of a small group of engineers researching concepts and creating standards to improve product serviceability. While looking at best practices, we discovered that a design engineering team in California was using a Microsoft product called NetMeeting on a “skunk works” basis. Quite simply, they did this at no expense and without the knowledge, support, or approval of the IT department. They used a discarded PC as a NetMeeting directory server and stuck it in a back room.  These engineers were using NetMeeting as a way of holding group meetings without having members travel between buildings on the campus. What our group discovered was that there was a NetMeeting compatible Sun Solaris software application called “SunForum”. This was big news to us because it meant that a software engineer using a PC in Boston could directly support an application engineer working on a Sun-based machine in our company’s Paris office. Up to that point, the conventional process would be phone conversations and e-mails until the point that the lack of progress forced someone to travel. If you loved travel, you hated the new M2M connectivity and if you hated travel, M2M collaboration was great news.

In 2013, remote control software should not be news to anyone. In fact, there are many software applications and hardware platforms that teams can use to collaborate. At the same time, these same platforms can also destroy collaboration and productivity. For example, an engineer wearing headphones and listening to streaming radio is unlikely to hear a neighbor’s communication and offer assistance.  What might work in these cases would be secure on-line chat forums and those could work wherever people were and which devices they were using. In summary, if people want to collaborate, they will find the tools and working styles to do it. If they don’t they will resist. Forcing everyone onto the same company campus won’t change that dynamic by itself.

Big Data Identity Crisis: Business Intelligence or Business Analytics?

The proliferation of “Big Data” technology has shifted the fundamentals of business intelligence to a more prospective view. This change in concept, however, has failed to maintain a common definition throughout businesses across the world. The distinction between Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA) is becoming increasingly blurred, and will worsen with the maturation of Big Data. After surveying several vendor websites, blogs, forums and other materials, we have consolidated our findings to provide some clarity and help readers better identify and relate to these terms.

You would likely be hard-pressed to find the same definitions from any two sources – even between professionals who have worked with business data for decades. Some will argue that the terms are interchangeable, while others will adamantly defend what they see as strict differences. Since being branded by the masses as a standalone discipline for organizations, BI has been identified by some to be a process of which BA is simply a part. Furthermore, some BI tools and services with analytic properties have fallen prey to marketing departments that have had no real understanding as to how they should be named. So, where should we draw a “line in the sand?”

In a nutshell, BI examines mostly internal, structured data from past decisions and actions to produce helpful insights for decision making, whereas BA focuses on data in the present (real-time or near real-time) and helps to model and predict the future. They are complementary concepts grown with, and out of, each other. Traditional data storage systems are not conductive for dynamic analysis, and employ several established, reactive BI applications including alerts, OLAP, ad hoc reports and more. The advent of M2M connectivity and new analytic software solutions, however, are contributing to the rapid growth and importance of forward-thinking BA applications like data/text mining, optimization, forecasting, and predictive modeling.

So where does Big Data fit in?

Big Data is a relative term, defined as a collection of both structured and unstructured data so large and complex that it cannot be efficiently handled by conventional database management systems. Big Data platforms can, and do, use legacy data, but BI initiatives may or may not use Big Data. In an increasingly connected world, enterprise decision-makers must adapt to match data analysis capabilities with the rising volume and velocity of data to remain competitive. A winning business strategy applies both BI and BA to maximize the ability to make predictive decisions while addressing immediate needs of the organization.

VDC Initiating Coverage on SMARC Embedded COMs

Supplier interviews for VDC’s 2013 Embedded Hardware Service for Embedded Products are currently underway. As a result of a recent SGET (Standardization Group for Embedded Technologies) announcement, we will now be including SMARC as a separate form factor in VDC’s embedded COMs report. SMARC, formerly known as ULP-COM, comprises a Kontron-proposed SGET standard for ultra low power COMs. In 2013, Kontron has announced the release of 3 new SMARC products utilizing one of Freescale, TI, or NVidia ARM-based processors. Somewhat similar in appearance to the DIMM-PC COM form factor which originated with JUMPtec (acquired by Kontron in 2002), SMARC modules are edge-connected rather than pin-connected as are many other COM form factors.

We expect low power computing modules such as SMARC which take advantage of new low power SoC products will find traction in many embedded markets, particularly in M2M applications. OEMs should be very interested in products that can be added to their existing platforms to add M2M functionality. In cases where an OEM’s products were not future-proofed with respect to available space or power supply capacity, being able to add new computing modules that support M2M without costly retrofits can be a huge advantage. In cases where M2M is being designed into a new system, these ultra low power computing modules can add the necessary functionality without having a huge impact on Bill of Material (BoM) costs.

We believe that VDC’s coverage of SMARC and similar embedded devices is of critical importance, both to suppliers of those products as well as to their customers. To put it simply, nobody wants to “bet on the wrong horse.” For an embedded product standard to be successful, it would have to be supported by several suppliers and purchased by a solid and wide customer base. Given any uncertainty, customers and suppliers are more likely to commit their money to proven products and standards, no matter how compelling the new developments might seem from a technology standpoint.

In 2013, VDC will work with both suppliers and their customers to determine which new products and standards are gaining traction and which, if any, product types or standards are losing share. It should be a very interesting year.