New-Tech Europe | February 2019

Community Boards as Development Platforms

Attila Ambrus, Arrow Electronics

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

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

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

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