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At the beginning of a new project the
first phase of the HW development
is creating a design that can prove
feasibility of our idea. It is called proof
of concept (PoC). After defining the
optimal SoC/FPGA/CPLD/MCU you
need to find a ready to use board with
the required interfaces and feature
set. There are multiple factors that
affecting which development platform
is best fitting to a project. Let’s see
the available options:
Development kit from SoC
manufacturer.
Usually the supplier devkits are the
very first boards that are available
to start working on an SoC after its
release so if you are in a hurry to get
a hand on the newest technology
probably this is your choice. The
Board Support Package (BSP) is
usually containing the most up to date
packages and most probably this is
customization and optimization for
the kit. The provided support package
possibly contains closed source
binaries that are not editable by the
developer. Support models can differ
supplier to supplier offering different
services and cost levels.
Community Boards
In case the core part is not finalized
yet, and it is necessary to test
multiple SoCs without major change
in the ecosystem the best choice is
Community Board. It has a massive
supporting network with various
available sample projects and
applications. If a developer blocked
by an issue it is most probably not the
first occurrence and most probably
there are already a fix for that. It also
comes with an ecosystem that provides
standard form factor, reusable,
scalable, modular development
environment.
Opensource
SW
Community Boards as Development Platforms
Attila Ambrus, Arrow Electronics
the source of all the third party BSPs.
The disadvantage of these boards
that every socket is coming from the
same semiconductor company as the
SoC itself. It does not matter if there
is a cheaper or better solution, they
will promote their product anyway.
Developers are usually doing a hard
copy-paste of all the design section
that are working as it is. So this can
lead to a non-optimized BOM.
System on Module (SoM)
development kit
If the project quantity is too low for
custom board design it is required to
choose a partially ready solution to
save the designing cost. SoM is a good
alternative. The development can be
started on the SoM itself by attaching
it on the manufacturer’s evaluation
carrier board. The BSP provided
for the board is usually ported from
the SoC supplier’s BSP after smaller
52 l New-Tech Magazine Europe