The continuing pressure on designers to develop products faster, cheaper, with greater performance, improved functionality and lower power consumption, places onsiderable stress on the traditional design process.
Add in the fact that at the component level device complexity is nearly doubling every 18 months and what you are left with is a growing need of design expertise that spans multiple disciplines.
As a result, there is a rising trend by developers to leverage reference designs from component distributors to not only shorten their design cycle, but to reduce risk and improve product features.
The concept of reference designs is not new. Semiconductor suppliers such as Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, and many others have a long history of providing application notes and reference designs that show design engineers how to use their devices.
What is new is the offering of “block-level” and “system-level” reference designs from distributors, which demonstrate how to connect multiple chips, from multiple suppliers, to create more complete solutions that developers are looking for.
As a distributor we work with suppliers to implement designs demonstrating their products in a proven hardware platform or development kit. In many cases, we see our engineering customers copy various sections of these platforms for their own designs in order to speed the development process.
From power supply solutions for FPGAs to high-speed memory interfaces and PCI Express links with embedded processors, engineers can leverage the schematic, layout, and bill-of-material information that is provided as part of a downloadable reference design package.
In addition to the hardware-based reference designs, software reference designs also enable platforms to perform a certain task. There is growing interest in this area, as engineers struggle with the expanding adoption of embedded operating systems such as Linux and Windows Embedded System 7 and real-time operating systems, such as ThreadX, and QNX.
Both hardware and software engineers are looking for ways to jumpstart their projects. Having access to a suite of code examples or reference designs showing a platform running a simple application on top of a given OS is a big deal in terms of time to market and reduced risk.
It also allows them to focus their efforts on the value-add features they can offer and not spend time re-inventing the wheel.
Author is Jim Beneke, v-p technical marketing at Avnet Electronics Marketing
www.goldtech.net.cn
