How best to take technical support advice to the designer is one of the questions which have vexed semiconductor suppliers for many generations of their products.
As costs of providing tech support increased more of the function was shared with distributors.
Some of which were better equipped for the task than others.
Online tech support is now changing the way suppliers and distributors communicate with their customers.
But for many suppliers this has not detracted from the power of active face-to-face meetings with designers.
According to Andy Thorne, general manager for PLD & embedded at Silica, which hosted the
X-fest design and training event at Silverstone last week, as many as 80% of the designers attending the event had specific projects active or in the planning stage.
“They were looking for design advice on specific products and getting a level of confidence that their designs will work,” said Thorne.
The event has moved away from a focus on FPGAs and covers system-level designs; incorporating power, interface, memory and peripherals as well as the
processor or FPGA.
Along with FPGA firm Xilinx, participating suppliers included Cypress, Intel, National Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, NXP and MathWorks.
“Face-to-face is still important for true technical support and the customer appreciates this,” said Thorne.
The role of online technical support programmes is different. They provide continuing tech support on a daily basis.
A recent example is a website created by ARM to support prototyping of microcontroller-based systems.
See: ARM uses web to address Cortex-M3 design“When offering CPU performance of over 140DMIPs at 120MHz, combined with a range of peripherals like USB, Ethernet and CAN, it’s equally important to offer increased ease-of-use and rapid prototyping capabilities,” said Geoff Lees, v-p and general manager at NXP, which is partnering with ARM on the website called “mbed”.
It launched with hardware and software support for the NXP LPC1768 ARM Cortex-M3 processor-based MCU.
Lees is excited by the potential of the web-based development based on open platforms such as Eclipse.
“This is the most exciting time in this industry,” said Lees.