PHYTEC is a German company which has been producing system on module boards (SOMs) for over 25 years so I connected with Yves Astein, a product manager at PHYTEC to get his take on the rise of ARM based SOMs and embedded computing boards.
Yves told me that about 10 years ago PHYTEC started producing ARM based SOMs using Marvell Semiconductor SoCs and got early experience with Linux on ARM and then they added Freescale chips to the mix. Yves said that over time as new ARM cores became available the company shifted more of their efforts to ARM and away from PowerPC and x86. According to Yves the majority of PHYTEC’s business is now ARM based and the reason is simple, customers want the interfaces and price performance that products like the Freescale i.MX and TI OMAP chip families can offer.
The other thread in this shift is the rise of Linux in the embedded market place and now most systems shipped by PHYTEC run on Linux. Yves told me that they ship a full board support package including a Linux distro to every customer so they can get to market quickly. When I asked about security he said that Linux now has some stable and well supported security features which are directly supported in hardware by Freescale and TI with burnable fuses so hackers can’t get to the flash for example. Here is a typical PHYTEC SOM:
PHYTEC has a very clear business proposition for companies and I think it’s worth sharing because it hits the classic “build vs. buy” decision head on:
Consider this example break even calculation for a microprocessor based design with 49 weeks NRE for hardware, software, and production test development, plus 12 weeks downstream engineering maintenance, and $40 raw materials. Manufacturing and test costs are typically 30% of the materials.
Make
Buy
NRE (49 man weeks)
$250,000.00
$0
Future maintenance (12 man weeks)
$60,000.00
Cost per unit (5k EAU)
$52.00
$64.00
Break even quantity
25,417 units
I asked next about PHYTEC’s key customers and markets and I think this tells their story in a microcosm; they are doing very well in industrial automation, visual inspection systems for manufacturing, fitness machines and ground transportation. Looking at ground transportation in particular, a passenger bus needs systems for routing (GPS), displays for rider information, security and safety camera’s and a cashier system all of which have some level of computing, display and connectivity. At PHYTEC they work with customers whose expertise is in their product (building the bus) and help integrate the hardware and software into that product. PHYTEC will even write the code and support the hardware over time.
I think the PHYTEC business model is perfect for small to medium sized companies who don’t have the resources to design their own hardware but want the latest technology to compete in their markets. It’s another version of the COTS (commercial off the shelf) wave that changed the Mil/Aero market in the 1990’s.
Obviously every conversation I’m having about Embedded Computing Boards has to cover the IoT question so I asked Yves for his take. Yves told me that PHYTEC's work in the IoT is still evolving, their SOMs are gathering data from sensors and sending it to gateways and then onto databases and that’s a basic definition of the IoT but according to Yves its not seamless yet and there is no one company with all the pieces needed to make this happen. I will stay in touch with Yves and let you know how the IoT evolves for Phytec because they are on the front line. You can see the PHYTEC boards and many others in our Single Board Computers.
So to sum up the PHYTEC story is based on taking the best ARM based technology and then integrating into end products. It looks like a great strategy and they have just added ARM based processors from Rockchip into their portfolio. What's your experience of the build vs buy decision?