The current market situation demands a different kind of distribution service from that offered traditionally: especially when the market is down, the distributor’s value to the customer will come as much from enabling rapid, high-value application development as it does from supporting custom hardware design.
The environment changed for customers, meaning the pressure of competition is now felt from around the world, not just within the UK. Also, there 
are shorter and shorter design cycles, driven by improvements in technological capability and by intensified global competition, which require accelerated design processes.
If the UK is to thrive as one of the centres of electronics development, it will be by designing high-margin, value-added products that more than offset the high costs of operating here.
In this context, a 4-points-model can be used to meet the engineering requirements and to 
help customers to get to market quicker with advanced, feature-rich applications:
1) Provide appropriate, extendable, available-on-demand hardware development platforms that allow software to be written before custom hardware is ready.
2) Reduce the OEM’s board design and layout overhead. In particular, OEMs need design support that accelerates the customisation of generic development platforms and that eliminates the wasted engineering effort associated with the design of non-core hardware elements such as power circuits and the signal chain.
3) Train OEM design engineers early in the use of advanced core technologies such as processors.
4) Extend product and design-in support up from the hardware level to the operating system, to ensure that application developers have a working platform as early in the design cycle as possible.
The traditional distribution model aims to meet these new needs by adapting existing design-in services or bolting on new ones. For instance, many distributors will support the wide range of evaluation kits provided by device manufacturers. Extra emphasis is also often given to supporting core technologies such as microprocessors and programmable logic.
There is an important difference between application-oriented boards designed by a distributor for specific design applications and the type of limited-function evaluation boards produced by device manufacturers to showcase a particular IC. Application specific boards offer a much greater choice of peripheral support and extension modules than standard evaluation boards.
There are two benefits to European OEMs from using a proprietary board such as this – one obvious and one less so. The obvious advantage is that OEM engineering teams can use the board layout as a template for their own hardware design, and so reduce development time.
All relevant design files will be made available to customers, and so adoption and modification of our board design is easy to do. Further, the boards can actually be used as development platforms, enabling the writing of application software right from the beginning of a design project, with confidence that the final hardware design will not perform significantly differently.
The second advantage also helps reduce development time, but in a less obvious way: because teh distributor designed the board, it can share with customers the knowledge gained from working with the components.
It’s not unusual for one particular detail of peripheral circuitry or board layout to have a disproportionate impact on the performance of an FPGA or processor. These quirks are not always revealed in the part’s datasheet. But customers can learn from our FAEs the inside secrets of designing a board around a particular FPGA or processor.
Laurence Dellicott is technical marketing manager at Silica UK