Dan Casey of Future Electronics talks to Richard Wilson about how the distributor is supporting local designers.
Make no mistake the upturn is happening and distributors are making the most of a new wave of design starts in the UK.
This is the view of Dan Casey, European managing director of Future Electronics, who sees similarities between the new design activity taking place in the UK and that in Silicon Valley in the US.
“The UK design community is like another California, projects are being designed here and manufactured somewhere else,” says Casey.
Casey believes that the distributor can tap in to this local design activity with its plan to introduce a series of end-market focused sales channels, which he calls “verticals”.
The aim is to replicate the success Future has had over the last few years with is LED lighting and renewable energy product channels.
“These verticals are defined by development activity in the local market which here means security, smart metering and high end audio as well lighting and energy,” says Casey.
“My target is to roll out one new vertical each quarter and the first one will be audio,” says Casey.
This will include new audio IC lines, reference designs and software. “We are definitely looking to increase our strength in the area of software development and support,” says Casey.
See also: Development board for Freescale smart meter chip
To short-cut the time-consuming process of connecting development boards from different chip suppliers together in a full system, the distributor came up with a method which uses a common bus interface and physical interconnect format to plug in multiple development boards featuring components from different manufacturers.
Initially launched as Future-Blox based on Freescale processors, the concept has been added to over the years which it promotes through its “Board Club” developers website.
Recent examples are the reference design for embedded systems based around the Microchip PIC32MX5, MX6 and MX7 families of 32-bit microcontrollers and the Panel Interface Module (PIM) which is based on Freescale’s i.MX ranges of 32-bit microprocessors.