The Middle is A Bad Place to Be if You’re a CPU Board

EHHHHHHH. Ehhhhh. Death by trickle, shrinking at 3 to 5% a year for a while. There might be hope for a really small module, like COM Express or its relatives, but the big bad backplane and stackable form factors will struggle to hold ground. Just wait until the defense budget cuts start coming (something people are loathe to admit, “but UAVs are growing” … these budget shortfalls will come from somewhere, folks).

I chuckled when I read that the TI OMAP family was “dead”, the proclamation from many bloggers after TI said recently they are refocusing away from mobile and toward embedded applications. Squeezed out, yes – from one end by the Apple/Samsung/ Qualcomm love triangle, and from the other end by the onslaught of the new Chinese/Taiwanese mobile SoC designs we’ve been talking about. But TI and vendors like them are headed straight for low-end boards with their SoC technology.

The volumes in these embedded applications are much more fragmented – tens of thousands of projects consuming hundreds to thousands of parts, instead a few projects consuming a few million. That’s why cloud connectivity, expansion interfaces, configurability via FPGA, or outright SoC design where board design used to live, are vital.

That tablet comment is worth revisiting. Where one used to have to design some cool handheld terminal with hardware to attach a barcode scanner, or a scale, or a temperature sensor, those are now all connected via wireless. That means the “closed” tablet that might have connectors for USB or HDMI isn’t really closed, it’s open to the cloud for expansion. Most of that effort that went into large scale backplanes or stacking for system I/O expansion isn’t needed any more. Expansion will be on a small scale, like the connectors on the edge of the BeagleBone above.

Ehhhh. The middle is a bad place to be. TI got out of their middle mobile SoC situation to get into the low end CPU board situation leveraging their technology, and it’s a move that will pay off for them long term. It’s no coincidence that Freescale is putting tons of energy into ARM microcontrollers, similar thinking. Intel would be wise to invest a lot more resources to push their mobile SoC into embedded; they are already making their Atom push cannibalizing sockets for some of their bigger CPUs.

What do you think? Are your teams doing less board design and more FPGA and SoC design? Does the cloud shift the embedded equation from a box with a lot of I/O to a tablet with an app and wireless connections to data? How long will the risk-adverse defense industry stay on their old technology before they move? Are defense budget cuts unthinkable? Are more powerful MCUs taking sockets that used to need a microprocessor? Or is the mid-range CPU board market just resting up before making a comeback?