New-Tech Europe | February 2019

From Development Board to Production Solution in Zero Time Amir Sherman, Director of Engineering Solutions & Embedded Technology, EMEA, at Arrow Electronics

Today, with social media getting out information so quickly, customers need to have their products ready in zero time, and Arrow, as a technology provider, must be able to support this need. To do that, Arrow is moving toward solution-selling while continuing to support the needs of legacy customers, thereby supporting customers no matter what step they are at with their projects and no matter what the request. One example is for the IoT gateway market, wherein many customers need fast solutions but the options are endless. The customer needs to adopt a popular solution and change it to fit their end application. Let’s use a success story that we had with a customer that got a very popular community board from Arrow called DragonBoard 410c. The DragonBoard 410c is the first development board based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon

400 series processor. It features advanced processing power, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth connectivity, and GPS, all packed into a board the size of a credit card. Based on the 64-bit– capable Snapdragon 410E processor, the DragonBoard 410c is designed to support rapid software development, education, and prototyping and is compliant with the 96Boards Consumer Edition specification from www.96boards.org. After only two months, the customer realizes that they will NOT be able to develop a full IoT gateway- even though he had all of the documentation, software, and firmware—because of his request for time to market, so they have to ask for an industrial version of this board. Normally, this is not a popular solution because many suppliers are developing reference boards and development boards only, but Arrow

also has ready-to-use industrial boards that are similar. In this case, the DB4 from Geniatech is the industrial version of the DragonBoard 410c that also includes Ethernet, different and more popular power connectors, and other features not included on the community board. With this board, the customer was able to add only a case and, in two months, release the first working prototype to their end customers. But the story doesn’t end there. Because of this fast time to market, Arrow was requested to support the same solution but add another Ethernet port for Power over Ethernet (PoE). This needed to also come in a “box/case” form factor but could quickly increase to large quantities. Typically, when doing business, a distributor will tell the customer that they need to do this by themselves, but as a technology provider, Arrow

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