
Adlink automates I-Pi SMARC carrier board design
Adlink Technology has teamed up with PCB design tool supplier Altium on a fully automated process for customised carrier boards for its i-Pi modules that use the SMARC standard footprint.
This will be used with Adlink’s I-Pi SMARC industrial grade AIoT/IoT single board computers.
“I-Pi boards are made for industrial requirements of shock and temperature,” said Marco Krause, global account director at Adlink in Germany. “With a carrier board, we are building an industrial version of the Raspberry Pi but built on SMARC and not limited to ARM. We can scale from Intel’s Elkhart Lake processor up to the NXP i.MX8m and Qualcomm devices. We use the same approach as Raspberry Pi but we can use the latest ARM or x86 cores with options with VPU so they are AI modules,” he said.
The wider range of modules drives the need for custom carrier boards.
Upverter is a web-based drag-and-drop design tool that requires minimal engineering skills, allowing customers to create their own SMARC based carrier board design within hours and receive prototypes within weeks. Upverter generates the electrical design files of fully custom-defined carrier board designs on demand, as well as an instant Bill of Materials (BOM) complete with pricing, a customized device tree, documentation, and mechanical models.
The design service is available initially for SMARC modules based on NXP’s IMX8M and i.MX8M Plus and Rockchip’s PX30 and is accessible through Adlink’s I-Pi SMARC website.
“Altium’s embeddable experiences can be added to partner websites using only a couple of lines of code. Upverter offers ADLINK’s customers a simple yet innovative way to bring new products to life,” said Ted Pawela, Chief Ecosystem Officer at Altium.
“The Upverter tool is an innovative improvement of handling the proof-of-concept and prototyping phase for custom products. It will reduce the needed time to almost 50% in comparison to current approaches,” said Carsten Rebmann, Modules Product Manager at Adlink.
Next: Upverter i-Pi carrier board design trial
Upverter is available through the I-Pi SMARC website as a trial and Adlink will release the tool for production later in 2021.
https://www.ipi.wiki/; www.adlinktech.com.
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