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.