Embedded World 2022 - a subjective report

This year we exhibited on embedded world Exhibition&Conference for the first time, even though some of our team have been regulars for almost a decade. We see that most of our competition writes about their presence and products, so let’s break the mold, and focus on the event instead.?

And what an event it was! It totally did not disappoint – on the contrary, exhibitors and customers from all over the world attended, and gave a palpable feeling of a global gathering under a single roof. It was hard to move through the aisles at times - there were so many people that we encountered traffic congestions on the fair floor. We didn’t manage to see everything - it’s really a hard feat as an exhibitor, especially with the interest that our products and services gathered.?

Fairs like #EW22 are typically the greatest place to form new business relations. Top level officials from all companies are all gathered in a single place, and thanks to that, in 3 days you can accomplish an equivalent of months of communication and negotiations. The business dynamics during big fairs like this are completely different from the everyday workings of companies, when their affairs and key business people are often walled off with layers of questionnaires and automated assistants.?

While we do everything to avoid walling ourselves off from business opportunities, during this event that was even more prominent on our side – having our founders at the booth, Jakub Klama and Wojciech Kloska , turned out to be a great opportunity for clients to negotiate and receive binding, concrete information and cost estimates. Mateusz Gancarczyk , an Embedded World habitue and one of our best embedded hardware senior engineers, would share some of his outstanding expertise with those interested in deeper insights into our technology and product designs. And finally, the person responsible for all aspects of our appearance at the fair - Kamila K?pińska She’s our CCO, and did an exceptional job of preparing us for the event – everything was buttoned up to perfection – from appearance, booth design, to great handout materials and accessories ready for the taking (including the Embedded Fortunes Chocolates that garnered a lot of popularity). Thanks to her efforts, we could all focus on our clients and partners. Talking about marketing – shout out to Wirepas with their absolutely awesome Finnish #Mom campaign, we were all huge fans and followed the posts!

We’ve met a lot of friends, partners, clients and competition from all over the world, built some especially close friendships in #Croatia, and we’ve met many of our colleagues from #Poland. Eastern European tech people are stereotypically expected to have amazing skill, and it seems that this time we’ve all fit into the stereotype quite well ;)

You could, of course, get a hands on with our products at our booth:

WHLE-LS1, an #NXP #Layerscape based #SBC intended for huge #network load processing,

RCHD-PF, a diminutive #SoM based on a Microchip Technology Inc. #PolarFire #SoC #FPGA, adaptable to custom data and imaging processing acceleration, with its accompanying evaluation daughterboard,

and finally – KSTR-SAMA5D27, an extremely lean #SBC based on a #Microchip #ARM and focused on #security, low power consumption and long #off-grid operation.

We’ve learned a lot about our designs from the feedback we’ve gathered – once again, a proof how important events like #EW22 are for a company. You’ll see the results of the feedback in the consecutive releases of our boards, and meanwhile, if you missed seeing those boards in person, feel free to explore them on our website.

We were hoping to meet some of our partners from Microchip live, however they decided on an online presence at the event only. We can’t blame them – from what we know, they treat the #COVID-19 hazard very seriously, and take a lot of precautions to protect their staff. It’s really admirable that a company can go to such extents in caring for their employees, and we fully understand and support their decision.?

英特尔 had their booth close to us, so we couldn’t help but notice that their #NUC lineup was completely missing from their exposition. NUCs, or Next Units of Computing are small prosumer-oriented machines that became a go-to solution for quick deployment of small and powerful x86 computers amongst many tech professionals. At present, there’s no competition on the market that would provide such a complete and smartly priced lineup of products from a single vendor. They’re readily available on the consumer market, allowing for a rapid deployment from zero to a working solution within hours of requisition. That’s invaluable in emergencies and rapid bulk deployments. Unfortunately, they were completely missing from Intel’s booth, apart from a few hidden ones, silently driving their demos and overhead displays. That was underwhelming, considering that NUCs are a really great product with wide availability on the consumer market. We’re disappointed that we couldn’t see and test their NUC product lineup live. They probably have their eyes elsewhere, considering their fab investments in Germany and Ireland, R&D in France, and the new megafab, currently under construction in the Arizona Ocotillo campus, that will boost production capacities for their Intel Foundry Services. But we’re still a little saddened that we couldn’t get our hands on those little x86 machines.?

And finally, a realization on our side. Being an European embedded company, it’s impossible not to know about the industrial embedded form factors like Qseven, COM Express, XTX, and a plethora of others, often featuring standardized board-to-board interconnectors. However, they do seem to be a uniquely European phenomenon. We’ve never had inquiries about these from global clients, and they seem to be relatively rare outside of the EU. Upon closer examination, what became striking for us is the inflexibility of these SoM standards, their features and interconnectors. What they make up in interoperability is often taken away in density, versatility, and power. They typically require a set of features that are inconsiderate of their specific application. Those overly specific features can be easily implemented on the daughter module, freeing up a lot of precious IO on the SoM. We could design something as dense, powerful, IO rich and versatile as our RCHD-PF by limiting ourselves to one of these standards, but the price tag would be exorbitant, and there would have to be some hard to swallow tradeoffs.?

Is this our bias, or do you have similar experiences? Would you be interested in seeing an RCHD-PF daughterboard fitting into one of the standard COM-Express form factors??

-- Michal Podziomek