Each of the four Centres of Excellence is a development laboratory with its own specialism, staffed by experienced engineers who are experts in application development, circuit design and board layout:
- Gdansk, Poland for embedded computing
- Munich, Germany for industrial automation and motor control
- Paris, France for connectivity and sensing
- Egham, UK for power electronics
The Centres of Excellence provide two types of service to Future Electronics’ customer base.
- Design assistance – on request from a customer, a Centre of Excellence can develop an entire functional block, providing a custom reference design which helps the customer to adopt new technology, or to manage a shortfall in development resources without slowing time-to-market
- Development of reference design boards – the Centres of Excellence develop application-oriented reference systems to demonstrate new products introduced by Future Electronics’ suppliers. Used by customers as a design template, these boards help to accelerate time-to-market for their end product designs
All these services are available to customers throughout the EMEA region. The design assistance provided by the EMEA Centres of Excellence is supplemented by expertise available from Future Electronics’ System Design Centres in Montreal, Canada and in the Asia-Pacific region.
Examples of reference design boards created by the Centres of Excellence include the GaNdalf 1kW Power Factor Correction (PFC) board, the Sequana secure embedded systems board based on the Cypress Semiconductor PSoC 6 series microcontroller, and the SPINnaker motor-control board released yesterday at Embedded World. The boards are on display at the Future Electronics stand, Hall 3.225.
