New Electronics spoke with Thomas Staudinger, president of Embedded Solutions, Avnet, and who is now leading this new organisation.
“This new brand delivers standalone modular embedded compute solutions and was a response to customers who we found were increasingly looking for part- or full- pre-made embedded compute platforms,” explained Staudinger, “and it brings together all of Avnet’s compute design and manufacturing capabilities.
“At electronica in November we saw a positive reaction from customers to this move, with most saying that we’d brought much greater clarity to our offering. There had certainly been a degree of confusion about that offering – was it a distribution or product piece – but now they are a lot clearer about what we are doing. We have a new roadmap for our modules and are looking to extend our portfolio.
“There are a lot of brands operating in this market – it’s very fragmented – so our aim is for Tria to drive greater consolidation. While we are a separate entity to Avnet, we do have an exclusive distribution agreement with them and they will continue to manage large customer accounts but that could change depending on how Tria develops.”
According to Staudinger most of the company’s computing modules have been based around the X86 but he suggested that there was now growing momentum towards Arm mainly as a result of its greater power efficiency.
“Power budgets are critical and there is pressure from customers to move to Arm. We’re also working with the likes of NXP, Renesas and now Qualcomm. The team at Tria can design and manufacture standard embedded compute products, but we can also deliver custom designs for customer projects.”
Above: Tria’s first product under the new brand was the COM Express Type 6 Carrier - the MSC C6-MB-EV4
That’s critical and a key differentiator for Tria, that ability to take custom designs and move them from the prototype stage to commercialisation at speed.
“Our aim is to get more specialised and to understand the needs of customers better. We have 2000 products so it can be confusing, so what we offer needs to be simplified and match what the customer is looking to develop. They tend to look for standard products and then use software to differentiate. So, we need to offer the hardware support they need because for many that is where the key challenge is and that’s where Tria can add real value.
“Tria modules can be used 'as-is' in a product design, or as a starting point for customisation. What we want to do is unlock the huge computing potential for OEMs who would otherwise have to either start from scratch, or compromise on their product design by using an off-the-shelf compute product.”
Tria builds on Avnet’s established embedded compute and advanced applications solutions and has extensive in-house design and manufacturing campuses across Europe as well as extended design and manufacturing capabilities both in North America and Asia.
“Tria represents a step change in what OEMs can achieve with their product design by making it easier to leverage the latest technology and get ahead of the competition,” said Staudinger.
Key technical issues for the sector going forward, according to Staudinger, include power, security and wireless. Less so artificial intelligence as customers have yet to come up with a suitable business case to drive investment.
Tria’s first product under the new brand was the COM Express Type 6 Carrier - the MSC C6-MB-EV4 – which was developed to enable engineers to evaluate and prototype system electronics and software before an application specific baseboard is available and leverages the capabilities of Tria’s COM Express product portfolio helping customers to accelerates their own COM Express carrier development.
It can be used for evaluation, rapid prototyping, lab trials, system design and concurrent application software development.
According to Staudinger the embedded market is likely to see limited growth over the next six months.
“With many of our key markets – automotive, industrial automation and medical - inventories are still full. Despite that Tria will continue to broaden its portfolio and we’ll double-down on creating different Arm platforms as we’re seeing real traction there. We want to help our customers to create unique solutions and one area we’re focused on is in developing Human Machine Interfaces (HMI).”
Staudinger points to Tria’s recent announcement where it joined forces with Qt Group, a global software company based in Finland, to develop new solutions to help OEMs build advanced HMI/graphic user interface (GUI) designs.
“This partnership will help us to deliver cutting-edge compute-on-module (COM) solutions,” said Staudinger, “and it enables us to empower our customers and provide them with the tools they need to create sophisticated HMI solutions – from design and manufacturing to delivery. Whether it is in industrial automation, medical, or any other embedded application, this collaboration helps our customers to get their projects off the ground quickly.”
