An embedded engineer today arguably has many more board resources at their disposal than their counterparts from 10 or even 5 years ago. Commercial board footprints are shrinking - cheap, small OTS boards such as the mini ITX can look like good platforms for embedded design projects.

Up to a point.

Unfortunately boards such as the Mini and Nano ITX  follow a life cycle model radically different from the requirements of an industrial based development. When you potentially have a raft of industry regulations to follow and a lengthy product development/test process, managing a 6-9 month product window is no joke. Taking into account the all important cost of ownership v's cost of purchase, the COM is a commercially attractive alternative. 

Think of a COM as an off-the-shelf building block with all of the functionality if a typical single board computer - CPU, main chipsets, RAM etc but without the usual IO connectors, eg: PS2, D-type etc. Instead the COM plugs into a custom host board using defined interface connections. The host board footprint, connector layout, GPIO and any application specific electronics are all tailored to your target application.  Decoupling the custom aspects of your design onto the host board keeps your design fast and relatively simple. The end result is a low maintenance, custom design with an easy upgrade path and exceptionally long life.

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