Accelerating Design Cycles with a System-on-Module Strategy

February 14, 2023

Blog

Design teams working on wireless products are increasingly caught in a Catch-22. Their companies are shortening time-to-market timelines for new products because of growing financial pressures created by the recessionary trends.

But those shorter timelines come with the expectation of more features that will differentiate the product. In short: the message is do more with much less time. Going faster, makes it harder to add features. And adding more features makes it harder to go faster. To add to the conundrum, global supply chain challenges make key components difficult if not impossible to obtain.

Those overwhelming pressures often make it impractical to employ a from-scratch engineering strategy for entire projects, which is often too slow, costly or risky to successfully meet the company’s aggressive go-to-market strategy. But a System-on-Module (SOM) design strategy provides a solution to many of the competing pressures above. A SOM design strategy is one that most engineers have heard of, but it has often been limited to niche use cases where a product’s size or other specifications makes SOM the only choice. But utilizing a SOM is compelling for a far broader set of design projects today, particularly given how it helps engineers resolve the Catch-22-like pressures I discussed above.

SOM’s integrated-board design eliminates the complex engineering tasks that are required in chip-down designs utilizing high speed chip-to-chip interfaces. A SOM utilizes a single integrated circuit board that includes the wireless module, the device’s main processor, high speed RAM, reliable flash memory, and power management. A SOM strategy simplifies engineering by providing engineers with a pre-designed, pre-certified solution that integrates the wireless module and the device’s main processor on the same board. The solutions also have pre-built functionality that often matches the feature set engineering teams are being asked to deliver.

This allows design teams to leap ahead in the product development process by using a pre-built SOM. The integrated solution eliminates a significant amount of design work while also delivering features that would be complex to achieve with in-house engineering resources, including enhanced security, rich multimedia, enhanced connectivity, machine learning and more. This approach also involves far fewer components, reducing the chances that projects will be bogged down by shortages and delays in the supply chain.

This acceleration and simplification of wireless design is valuable for every engineering department, but particularly for those with a small staff and limited resources. A SOM strategy allows these smaller design teams to keep pace with intimidating project pipelines and aggressive timelines. As an anecdotal example, the companies my team works with have cut 12-18 months off of their development timelines while also delivering more functionality at the same time.

Pre-built security features are one of the major advantages of a SOM solution that can help engineering teams design faster and deliver more functionality. This is particularly important for teams designing medical devices, industrial sensors, and other devices that must meet stringent regulations or corporate standards for security like secure boot and FIPS. Building out these security elements can require months for a chip-down design approach because of how much of the work is time-consumingly done from scratch. It is slow, expensive, and risky. SOM design using pre-designed hardware and software solutions can deliver those security features out of the box, saving months of development time in the process.

Resource partitioning is another advantage of SOM design. Resource partitioning on the board gives designers the ability to build layers of protection and isolation within the overall design. The first form of this is the ability to run a Linux OS and RTOS simultaneously on different parts of a multi-core heterogenous application processor. This allows the device’s most critical functions to run in real-time on the microcontroller without being interfered by user interruptible processing priorities like touchscreen displays.

Virtualization within the device’s multi-core microprocessor is another major advantage because it allows different features to be fully supported by their own dedicated versions of Linux that are firewalled from one another. For example, connectivity can be isolated to its own Linux instance while display and user input are isolated to different Linux instance. This ensures that critical features do not have to compete against one another and are prioritized with their dedicated version of the embedded Linux OS. Another benefit of virtualization in a SOM system is enhanced security, allowing engineering teams to build firm walls between the wireless radio and wired networking that communicates externally and the rest of the device. This has significant advantages for incorporating stronger security in devices.

SOM may have been limited to niche use cases in the past, but that is no longer the case because it helps engineering teams solve so many of the complex expectations they face. By using a SOM design strategy, they can design wireless products faster, with more features, with more security – all while avoiding the supply chain issues that are causing delays for so many product development projects.

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Dan Kephart is the Senior Product Manager of IoT Platforms at Laird Connectivity, which provides a full range of modules, antennas and IoT devices that simplify the process of using wireless technology, including SOM solutions. In this role at the company, he oversees development of solutions utilizing multiple wireless technologies including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular. He has 15 years of experience in the engineering and wireless design industry, and he earned his degree in computer engineering from the University of Akron.