Kishan Jainandunsing
(February 2006)

In this column we highlight monthly in a series of articles the value propositions of the COM Express standard. This month’s article is about keeping jobs home with COM Express.

Keeping Jobs Home with COM Express

Summary

Offshore outsourcing trends continue to hollow out local engineering teams across the industrial landscape. COM Express offers OEMs in the embedded industry with the technology to focus their local engineering teams on innovative product design and rapid response to fluctuations in local market needs.

Historical Perspective

When the COM methodology was introduced in the embedded industry in the mid 1990's and the US economy was booming with plenty of jobs to go around, engineers generally regarded it as a threat to their jobs, rather than a technology that can preserve jobs. Understandably so, because adopting COM products in their designs would mean that engineers designing the host computer subsystem would no longer be needed.

A decade later, many in-house engineering jobs had been lost. Not because of COM's increasing adoption, but because of the much greater forces of globalization and free trade. Ironically, the COM methodology is turning out to be an important technology to keep jobs in-house - a realization which is sweeping rapidly through the embedded industry.

The Outsource vs. Time-to-Market Dilemma

With the trend to go offshore, companies in the embedded industry are simultaneously realizing that there is tremendous value in keeping some level of product engineering close to the local markets they serve. The long time-constants, using engineering analogies, inherent with offshore outsourcing, cause OEMs to be less responsive to (unpredictable) fluctuations in local market needs. These fluctuations constantly open up finite windows of opportunity. They require quick product introductions to capitalize on them, as well as product innovation. See Figure 1. Too often companies find out too late that using an offshore out-source company presents a formidable challenge for project, engineering and product managers to get these products out quickly.

Figure 1.Time-to-market advantages of local design teams

At the same time these same managers find themselves in a bind as they are under constant pressure to cut cost, leaving them with engineering teams stripped to the bones. Companies can only bootstrap themselves out of this dilemma by increasing productivity of remaining engineering teams by having them focus on core value-added design, while sourcing other subsystems as off-the-shelf components.

Designing host subsystems in-house adds little value in the corporation. The host subsystem is often a constant to many designs and is more a routine than a creative, value-add activity. The host subsystem is therefore best acquired as an off-the-shelf subsystem and integrated into the rest of the design that does represent value-add and that is worth to be designed in-house.

The COM Express Solution

The traditional single board computer (SBC), as an off-the-shelf component for the host subsystem, is a good example of an off-the-shelf host subsystem. However, SBCs have some nasty shortcomings. The most pronounced ones are:

• Product lifecycles, which are limited by the lifecycle of the chipset.
• Difficult to interchange between products of different manufacturers or even between products of the same manufacturer, due to non-standardized I/O connector, header and expansion slot positions.
• Limited applicability or none at all to form factors other than floor installed or bench top.

A COM solution on the other hand has none of the above shortcomings. In fact, it provides the designers with maximum flexibility in design decisions as the carrier board can be made to fit any desired form factor - floor installed, bench top, mobile or handheld. And within each form factor category, the designers are free to choose a footprint that best fits the local market's requirements. Of importance to highlight here is that carrier boards are often significantly less complex to design and do not require rapid upgrades of design tools to keep up with the next generation of host CPU, memory bus speed, etc.

A COM solution also does not put a dependency on the chipset for the product's lifecycle. And lastly, since the designers control the design of the carrier board, they can design it to fit exactly to the product's enclosure. Combined with the fact that obsolescence of host subsystem components (mostly CPU and chipset) is isolated from the carrier board, product lifecycles can be very long and non-recurrent engineering costs can be recovered over a longer period of time.

The key to realize these advantages of the COM approach lies in standardization. That's where the role of COM Express comes in as an open industry standard. COM Express provides project, engineering and product marketing managers with the assurance of a stable and solid standard, while procurement managers are easily able to incorporate COM Express modules as well-characterized commodities in their component lists. Through the incorporation of the latest I/O technologies, such as PCI Express and Serial ATA, and with headroom for future generations of these technologies, such as PCI Express and Serial ATA at double data rates of current implementations, the standard is indeed defined to be relevant for quite some time to come.

Conclusions

The COM methodology in general, has turned from a perceived threat to in-house engineering jobs into a job-saver. The COM Express standard and products provide the necessary framework to turn this into reality. Designers and their managers can finally answer their employers' calls for fast time-to-market with innovative products for local markets in rapid flux, with the creativity and speed that fortifies the corporation's competitive DNA.

End of Part I