Henry Ford had the luxury of offering any colour as long as it's black - today it's all about product differentiation. The classic model is a product range offering entry level, classic and hi-end options within a product family. This can potentially leave the embedded engineer managing a number of boards across a range of product variants. With a COM board you have the option to standardise your platform yet scale at the same time.

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 connector, 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. Now here's the clever bit - because the core COM module is interchangeable you can populate your host board with a COM that reflects the specific performance requirements of that product within the product family.  You decrease the overall cost of ownership in managing just one hardware platform whilst only paying for the performance you need. At the same time you are getting a custom solution which won't slow down your time to market -decoupling the custom aspects of your design onto the host board keeps your design fast and relatively simple.

Blue Chip Technology can design and build your host board, our COM Design Service typically takes 30 working days from brief to prototype through to production. Alternatively we can provide you with all the technical guidance and documentation you need to bring up your host board and are happy to review customer schematics.   

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