VDC Research: Embedded Microprocessor, Board & Systems Market Blog

IoT Forcing Embedded Boards and Systems Vendors to Adapt to Survive

Emerging embedded hardware requirements are stirring up competition for motherboards and integrated systems while driving demand for more IoT-related systems integration services.

The global markets for embedded boards and integrated computer systems will see growing competition over the next five years, according to a new report by VDC Research (click here to learn more). The embedded hardware space is vast, continually evolving, and extremely fragmented with larger organizations often supplying several different board and/or system form factors as well as potentially a variety of SKUs featuring different configurations thereof. Systems integration services, in turn, are benefiting from the growing complexity of modern (connected) embedded systems and are seeing greater use for IoT designs.

“Complacency now will seriously hamstring the long-term development and growth potential for all embedded hardware players,” says VDC analyst Daniel Mandell. “Ramping requirements for processing performance, footprint, and scalability are forcing embedded hardware suppliers to adapt and adopt to new product form factors such as MicroATX, VPX, and xITX. Some more mature hardware form factors like ATCA will continue to see slight growth through the next five years, though new organic revenue generating opportunities for incumbent suppliers will be scarce and increasingly challenged by alternative architectures.”

For small-form-factor embedded systems, computer-on-modules (COMs) have emerged as a convenient solution for enabling cost-effective hardware flexibility. While a variety of COM standards have fragmented the market, some form factors such as COM Express and Qseven are expected to see strong market growth. Kontron is the longstanding frontrunner of the embedded COMs space, having pioneered the concept. Unlike COMs, the global market for PC/104 family modules is expected to remain relatively stagnant through the next five years as suppliers look to adopt newer and more heterogeneous form factors like EPIC.

The market share leaders for embedded integrated systems have focused their recent acquisitions and collaborations on facilitating software development and enabling broader industry application support. The potential acquisition of EMC Corporation by Dell could produce a new leader in the embedded integrated systems market. HP Enterprise has made some dramatic acquisitions in 2015 to expand its portfolio of LAN offerings and help its customers transition to hybrid cloud environments. To remain competitive with new and traditional market players, embedded systems suppliers must bolster their support and development offerings for more of the solution stack.

Online Resources: VDC's Embedded Boards, Integrated Systems, and Systems Integration Services Research Program - Learn About The Research Program

Calling all Embedded Board & Module Suppliers – Stand up and be Heard!

The winds of change are blowing through the embedded computer board and module market. As 2014 approaches, recent market consolidations and reorganizations will solidify. 2013 will go down as one of the most important years for suppliers to make their voices heard by VDC. Why is this so important? In 2014 and beyond there will be significant shifts in demand for embedded board and module products as seen by these results from VDC's 2013 survey.

Many OEM engineers will be designing their new products and, for the first time they will be using embedded modules as opposed to other product alternatives. At the same time, existing module users will be looking to migrate to the latest x86, ARM and/or FPGA processors and module types. These OEM engineers will value an authoritative 3^rd party source to better allow them to determine which product types are strongly supported and, which product types not gain the necessary market traction.  On a similar note, these OEM engineers and other entities with interest in the embedded market are looking to VDC to determine which suppliers are becoming the most resilient, innovative, and successful in the markets they serve. VDC provides this industry-wide guidance by taking a 360 degree view of the market but, even so, the supplier inputs we receive are, among the most valuable.

At present, VDC has been in contact with over 90 suppliers we believe are significant to the market and after many initial discussions have provided our top-level estimates for their company. We are following these e-mails and calls with our 2013 survey that has detailed estimates. If you have NOT received these e-mails, calls and survey and, you believe your company should be represented, please contact us immediately. If you have received this survey it MUST be received by Friday October 4 to ensure any corrections or fresh guidance are included in the VDC models that drive our reports.

 

Will the Hynix Wuxi Fire Impact the Embedded Computer Market?

We expect the September 4^th  fire at a Hynix semiconductor fab producing DRAMs to adversely impact suppliers of embedded products. The perception of a possible supply disruption for DRAMs has already affected pricing. Although Hynix is downplaying the event, the likely affect will be somewhere between a temporary shortage and a larger industry impact that some investors are predicting. Suffice it to say that the potential mix between a cleanroom and “thick black smoke” would be disrupting, even if the equipment was not obviously damaged. It is possible that materials and surfaces in some parts of the facility were contaminated. If so, the effects of semiconductor or electronic circuit board contamination may take months or even years to appear and this would have two possible impacts:

• Some of the Hynix production equipment may become less reliable, which can impact supply.
• Some of the components Hynix produces at that facility may have higher failure rates, particularly over the longer time frames in which embedded computers are deployed.

Whether either of these two possibilities will actually happen may be immaterial as embedded board and system suppliers are a cautious bunch who may choose to lock in supplies of DRAM products from alternative suppliers.

3D Printing Will Impact Embedded Computing? VDC’s View of the Future

Technologies are evolving quickly in 3D printing and new nano-materials. Will these new technologies impact the market for embedded computing products? We believe the answer is, yes, but, not immediately. The 3D printing process is too slow for the production volumes needed for many if not most products that contain embedded computing. The first embedded market impact of new 3D and nano technologies will be on the engineering processes that create products not the products themselves.

Is the concept of printing electronic circuits new? Not in the slightest. When I first began my engineering career in the late 70s, the company I worked for produced laser trim systems. These systems were used by customers to measure and perfectly adjust the resistors on ceramic modules that had been printed using a silk screen printing process.

Exhibit 1: Screen Printed Thick Film Ceramic Module

After process steps for printing the circuit traces and resistive components, the laser system would then be used to make continual measurements as laser pulses cut into the resistive material. This would increase the resistance until it met the target value. Prior to laser technology, this same task would have used a sand blast method. In either case, the modules would be completed by adding semiconductor dies and encapsulating the module.

Printed circuit boards (PCBs) are not really printed as much as they are plated and etched. Because of the density and complex circuits multiple layers are usually required. PCBs like the 70’s era ceramic modules require significant manpower and expense to design and layout the circuits and then create the necessary screens and photo masks needed to produce the product. Even with all the automated tools that engineers can utilize, this PCB development process can take a significant amount of time. If the first articles produced are found to have problems, a re-spin adds more time-to-market delay. It is worth noting that the equipment needed to create PCBs and embedded modules are expensive and therefore most companies rely on contract manufacturing specialists to produce them.

The same pictured module could be produced using a 3D printer either on top of ceramic or, perhaps, using another material as a substrate. The base might even be flexible, allowing the finished product to be more adaptable. By precisely controlling the amount of resistive material, a trimming process could possibly be eliminated. Even capacitors could, (in theory), be printed.

Most importantly, a small engineering team could be testing a prototype of a new embedded computer product within hours of developing it. Production of the verified design would still be completed by the aforementioned contract manufacturers, but the time-to-market would be more compressed and there would far less uncertainty about having to make engineering corrections. At a minimum, the ability to rapidly produce prototypes and proof-of-concept products can level the playing field for smaller less capitalized embedded computer suppliers.

In the distant future, as 3D printing capabilities and speed increase along with the development of nano materials that can be used as “ink”, embedded hardware may take on an entire new meaning. Consider an automotive part like a bumper that was manufactured with all of the electronics needed for a collision avoidance system completely embedded in the bumper’s material. As the bumper is printed, the circuit traces and components could be printed or picked and placed. Is this printing/embedded process feasible today? No, but like previous disruptive technologies its time will come.

What should embedded suppliers do now? As 3D and material technologies start to mature and stabilize, suppliers should begin to use 3D printing to produce prototypes of embedded sub-modules. This exercise should be conducted in parallel with traditional processes to test if and when time to market compression exists. When the new technologies are proven, suppliers can confidently develop new products because they will know that the engineering prototypes they produce will be reliable proxies for their completed products.

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. 

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.

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.

Situational Awareness – New Year’s Edition

In the last two days, I have written about two situational awareness applications for embedded hardware products. The first was toward the creepy side and the second much more acceptable on multiple fronts. I think you will find this somewhat in the middle.  As the New Year’s Eve approaches, you might find this application provides you with actionable intelligence that you can really use.

In Wednesday’s Boston Globe I read a story about a company called SceneTap and they provide a downloadable application that can give you current population and demographic information from local bars or hangouts that you might be interested in. How does SceneTap provide this product? The answer is quite interesting from both a technical and business perspective. Let’s look at both sides:

Business Perspective: SceneTap provides the downloadable application to users for free and it is activated when users open an account using a valid e-mail address. To the potential patrons, they can use the application to see if a place is “hopping” or not. SceneTap earns revenues by selling the hardware and/or service to establishments in a covered urban area. The value proposition to one of these establishments is multi-faceted. First of all, if you have a place that is relatively popular at least some of the time, it should increase business because more people will know that it is a good place to go. If they have a good time, they are likely to come back. The application can also provide management with actionable intelligence about the exact demographics of patrons during all hours, days, and/or events. Previously, this would have been done with less accurate and manpower-intensive qualitative data. SceneTap could also provide information on the application use either inside the establishment or, at a minimum how many times users looked up the establishment. This data could be used to send e-mail offers to targeted users and also be a source of advertising revenue for SceneTap.

Hardware Perspective: The SceneTap embedded hardware consists of people counters at the entry/exit doors and cameras that provide facial images that are analyzed by local and/or cloud-based computers. We believe that SceneTap can use something like Intel’s AIM Suite as part of the solution stack. SceneTap stresses that their application only performs facial analysis as opposed to facial recognition which is a very important distinction for placement of this product on the creepiness scale. So, if you are using the SceneTap application to determine if a specific person is at a particular place, you will have to use Twitter, Facebook or something else like a phone call for that actionable intelligence.

Other embedded hardware that could potentially deployed as part of the solution stack would be microphones and DSP components to detect sound levels and Wi-Fi equipment that could detect the number (but hopefully not identity) of SceneTap users inside the particular establishment.   

Final Thoughts: So, as you look for a place to go on New Year’s Eve, you might think of using SceneTap if they are covering your area. I am lucky because they do have coverage in Boston, but I would probably use it in a way that SceneTap founders probably did not originally envision.  Since I am no longer young, hip, or single, I would tend to use SceneTap to find a quite place that is NOT hopping. Then, I won’t have to stand in a line to get in, wait very long to get served, and most importantly, be able to hear the conversation of my wife.

Have a great New Year’s everyone and best wishes for a prosperous and fiscal cliff-less 2013.

That TV You are Viewing Might be Looking at You

This blog related to a Verizon patent application is a follow-up to a previous VDC embedded hardware blog talked about the embedded computing capability being added to signage. The Verizon patent application is for similar applications/technology related to set-top boxes.

If the Verizon technology described in the patent is deployed, that same type of technology mentioned in the previous blog on signage might one day apply in your living room.  The Verizon technology would monitor the TV viewing area using microphones, cameras and or sensors. These sensors could be located in the set-top box, TV, and/or mobile device. Verizon’s overall goal would be to gain situational awareness of the TV viewers to allow targeted advertising.  

Deploying this type of situational awareness technology will have to be done very carefully to avoid offending customers. The deployment will also need to be extremely securely to avoid any risk that the system would be hacked and expose customers to remote eavesdroppers/peepers. The risk that law enforcement would want to leverage such as system for court approved wiretaps can also not be discounted. To be clear, Verizon has only applied for the patent, there is no indication that this is close to an actual product at this point.

Verizon certainly would not be the first company with home intrusive-technology. If you have ever played Xbox360 Kinnect, you have seen that it snaps pictures of game participants. In addition to showing them on-screen after the game action finishes as entertainment, the Xbox 360 transmits some of these back to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform where the data is stripped of identifying elements but is often used by game developers as a part of a feedback process.

Embedded processors and situational intelligence will have an increasing presence in our home lives and certainly some of this is likely to be a bit creepy. In tomorrow’s blog, we will examine how this technology can be deployed for excellent non controversial causes such reducing the number and severity of tragedies like Sandy Hook and the Aurora Theatre.

Freescale i.MX 6: From Consumer to Industrial – A Broad-based Vertical Market Approach

Freescale recently announced its latest product family, the i.MX 6. With on-going trends towards display technology, the i.MX 6 line is targeted at a broad array of device types. The i.MX has historically saw the highest volumes from eReaders, with design wins in Kindles and a number of Sony devices. But, as the eReader market becomes more competitive, Freescale anticipates more future revenue from segments such as automotive (particularly infotainment), medical, and industrial.

The evolution of the i.MX has been based around ARM core technology. The i.MX 6 relies on the Cortex-A9 which enables scalable performance with multi-core capabilities while maintaining a cost effective solution. The processor is also feature-loaded with PCI Express, serial ATA, DDR3 and other I/O to address the goal of a highly flexible platform.  It has HDMI to meet consumer requirements and CAN to support industrial OEMs. From an operating system perspective Linux and Android are the primary options, but QNX, Windows Compact 7, VxWorks and Greenhills’ INTEGRITY are supported as well.

In terms of vertical markets, Freescale expects the i.MX 6 to start to show up in a number of applications. Consumer devices like eReaders and, increasingly, IPTV will constitute the bulk of the market for the near future. Over the next several years there is likely to be an increased shift towards automotive, with applications in the center stack and instrument clusters, particularly as vendors continue to upgrade from analog gauges. Automotive manufacturers are beginning to build in surround-view cameras that provide the driver a view of all angles around the vehicle as well. Over the longer term, the medical space has opportunities in home patient monitoring, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth making possible remote patient voice/video calls. To support the longer lifecycles required here, Freescale is guaranteeing supply for 15 years. Beyond these vertical markets, Freescale expects to begin to address additional markets, such as digital signage as ARM technology approaches the performance of x86.

From my perspective, one of the most interesting factors is the ecosystem of partners that Freescale has built around the i.MX 6. It not only includes established boards vendors like Congatec and Advantech, who are selling COM modules based around the processor, but also a low cost $69 Wandboard board developed by engineers in their spare time. This kind of do-it-yourself innovation really speaks to the grassroots approach that embedded hardware can still take, and it is a testament to the commitment of the embedded engineers to ensure that flexible platforms are available.