Hi everyone,
At VIA Embedded we had a pretty good year for our ARM projects, and thought I share with you our highlights for 2015.
This year we released 3 new products based on ARM SoCs (taking our current portfolio to 13 different products: boards, systems and a tablet). Two of them belong to our ARTiGO embedded automation series, while one expands our Computer-on-Module lineup, as we see increasing use for expandable/upgradable systems.
The ARTiGO A600 is built for industrial automation, with its four, high-voltage isolated RS-485 ports and additional digital I/O. It is using our own ARM SoC design, which was tried and tested in a number of other products in the last couple of years, and working pretty well.
The ARTiGO A820 is an IoT gateway device with dual Ethernet and digial I/O ports, and built around a Freescale i.MX6DualLight SoC. We made quite a few Freescale-based products, and they got really good response from customers, both regarding reliability and features. Previous systems were using i.MX6Quad, so this is one of our first DualLight designs to balance performance and environmental issues.
The QSM-8Q60 is our first ARM-based Computer-on-Module, targeting the QSeven form factor (with a size of only 70mm x 70mm). It is also using a Freescale i.MX6DualLite, as the ARTiGO A820. The Computer-on-Module design also allows us to provide a lot more connectivity and features compared to its size, and users can decide which functions they want to use (and choose/build your carrier boards accordingly).
On the software front the most changes this year were in two main areas.
First, moving our Freescale-based boards' BSP development onto Yocto. It has its quirks, but overall enabled us a lot more interesting use cases, that hand-rolled systems don't lend themselves to.
Second, for our current generation of devices, when there's an Android BSP available, we updated to 4.4.2, and working on newer versions. Our SmartETK that extends the functionality of Android for embedded uses also seen a couple of new features, and a large effort to unify the provided functionality across all the supported devices.
We have taken part in a couple of ARM-related events as well.
Earlier this year we have organized some embedded Android developers events in Shanghai and Beijing in China (some of the videos and slides are available online, though mostly in Chinese). They were very well received, and added to the discussions we have with Chinese embedded customers.
More recently, we were at the ARM Symposium 2015 in Japan, showcasing what we've been up to, and connecting up with the community. Japan shows a lot of potential for ARM-based devices, and we are doing a number of custom projects there.
Resin.io is a cloud application deployment startup, that made tremendous progress this year. We were really happy to provide them with boards from of our best-seller ARM model, the VAB-820 Freescale i.MX6Quad, which is regarded as a very reliable industrial device. Resin.io's platform brings a much more straightforward software development model to the table, and opens the door for high quality industrial applications for customers without limited development teams. This collaboration could also work only because of building on Yocto, showing the strength of decoupled hardware support and software value-add layers.
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We have a lot of plans for 2016, and looking forward to creating with ARM!
Cheers, and Merry Christmas to all of you!
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