SOMs represent the future of electronics design.
Guneet is an executive at Arduino and investor with successes in scaling businesses in Fortune 100 and Early/Growth stage companies.
Chip-down design has become the de facto standard for embedded computing across IoT, robotics and other industrial equipment. Selecting each component and building from the ground up results in a highly specialized product sold in large quantities, an ideal fit for large global companies.
But what about the many small- to medium-sized companies producing less than 50,000 units annually? With a constant demand for new electronic products (and for the workforce to support their production), most companies can’t afford to wait while the process of completing custom-designed products runs its lengthy course. This can sometimes take years and miss out on the current trends. Even if they did, they often don’t have the technical expertise in-house to achieve it in the first place. There’s got to be a better way.
The answer is the System on Module (SOM) approach, which makes the most sense as a path forward for everyone (but the industrial giants). In an era when time-to-market often decides a company’s fate, a modular SOM can give companies a head start on innovation at a lower cost and a competitive advantage in development through mass production. Companies simply are able to move faster than the competition by adopting this method.
SOMs begin with a pre-built module containing the necessary hardware (processor, RAM, flash, power, etc.) and access to a large community of open-source software developers. To use an analogy: Chip-down design is like building your own car and picking out exactly which component you want, down to the smallest detail. SOM is like buying a car, which comes pre-built. Ideally, not just a car, but a Tesla that also has a vertically integrated technology ecosystem. One path leads to faster time-to-market, lower production costs, expanded customization options and ease of integration. That’s a pretty easy choice.
Before joining my current company, I spent years leading product teams specializing in changing how old-school industries converted to new revenue models.
