The ability to offload production logistics, overcome challenges in the worldwide supply chain and ease of maintenance over in-house design are among key factors that will drive the System on Module (SoM) market for the next 5 years, according to experts at Variscite, a leading System on Module / Computer on Module provider.
Recent research by GM Insights estimated the SoM market size to be USD $1.5 billion in 2020 and poised to grow at a CAGR of 12 percent from 2021 to 2027. SoMs are an attractive option for embedded product manufacturers looking to leverage advantages of accelerated time-to-market, reduced development cost and risk, scalability, and ease of deployment and integration. These fully integrated systems provide the critical components needed to optimize product design, development and manufacture across a range of industries including medical, agriculture, automotive, control systems and multimedia.
Several of the factors that have created additional opportunities for higher volume implementation of SoMs today and for the near future over in-house chip-down design include:
- Increased complexity of design in both hardware and software
- Operational challenges caused by the pandemic and global chip crisis which have moved customers to SoMs
- Ease of platform maintenance with a SoM, especially these days when design changes are forced due to components not being readily available
- Price of SoMs becoming more attractive in general makes them viable in higher-volume production scenarios
“Companies are increasingly understanding the value of offloading the logistics of their designs to external SoM providers, which presents major market opportunities over the next few years,” said Ofer Austerlitz, VP Business Development and Sales of Variscite. “Of course, these opportunities can only be realized if SoM manufacturers are able to provide their clients with the stable lead times and availability needed to overcome the supply chain issues facing many organizations today.”
All Variscite production is performed in-house at fully ISO 13485, 9001 and 14001 compliant facilities, satisfying international customer and regulatory requirements for a broad range of industries. The company recently announced increased in-house manufacturing capabilities at its production and warehouse facilities by adding an additional production line to help bypass the component crisis due to the impact of COVID and supply chain challenges.
The company’s SoM portfolio includes products with a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) based on a 1.8GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 iMX 8M Plus processor to align with the machine learning at the edge trend in the embedded systems market. Variscite has two SOMs that are based on the i.MX8 Plus processors, the VAR-SOM-MX8M-PLUS and the DART-MX8M-PLUS. Both are members of Variscite’s Pin2Pin families which provide a wide range of solutions from low-power and cost-sensitive entry point System on Modules, up to impressive power and multimedia performance solutions. In addition, Variscite’s eco-system includes extended boards with a dedicated AI processing unit, providing up to 26 TOPS that can be mounted on several i.MX8-based SoMs that have no integrated AI engine.
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