CEO Interview: Thomas Staudinger of Tria Technologies
Avnet is one of the world’s largest distributors of electronic products, but it also has its own board manufacturing business, Tria Technologies, based in Germany.
Thomas Staudinger, president of Tria Technologies, talks to Nick Flaherty at eeNews Europe about the re-branding of the Avnet board business and expanding its European board production lines.
“We decided last year to make Tria a clear brand,” said Staudinger (above). “As we are owned by Avnet there is sometimes a mis-understanding between the embedded business and the distribution business.”
The embedded business makes carrier boards that take various modules from Avnet’s line of customers. Tria can then design and build custom boards with the software stack if the design needs high volume production. “So we are investing to expand into these modules, with ARM-based Qualcomm AI modules, and that will be a major move for us and we are planning five products in total in the next two years.”
The first are the small form factor SMARC2.1.1 modules use the 6nm Qualcomm QCS5430 and QCS6490 processors that add more performance to Avnet’s portfolio of modules.
“Our new collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies allows Avnet to extend our offerings of modules to include high-end ARM technology,” said Staudinger. “These solutions deliver powerful performance and are purpose-built for industrial and commercial IoT applications. These applications include ruggedized handhelds and tablets kiosks, industrial scanners, dash cameras, point-of-sales systems and human machine interface systems.”
The Qualcomm SMARC module
The SM2S-QCS6490 has 12TOPS of performance with four ARM Cortex-A78 cores and four ARM Cortex-A55 cores as well as the Adreno 643 GPU, Adreno 633 VPU and the latest Hexagon AI processor. The SM2S-QCS5430 offer more of a balance between compute, power consumption and price.
“The market is changing. A lot of hardware engineers are baby boomers so there will be a number of people retiring so system development has become a make or buy decision and we see this increasing. So we now have a group focussing on the COM carrier boards for x86 and ARM, and then custom boards for higher volumes and taking that to full systems with the HMI interface software.”
The SMARC modules sit alongside COM Express modules that add PCI Express and other high speed serial technologies like SATA, USB and digital display interfaces on a COM (Computer On Module).
The MSC C6-MB-EV4 is a carrier board (below) was the first Tria board, designed to evaluate and prototype system electronics and software before an application specific baseboard is available. This is manufactured by Tria to provides the interface infrastructure for the COM Express Type 6 modules and offers a variety of IO connectors for external access. The carrier board supports PCI Express Gen 4 and 2.5Gb Ethernet available with latest module generations. This allows developers to quickly test and choose a module from the Avnet Embedded COM Express portfolio.
The mix of standard to custom boards is 70/30 but going forward five years out Staudinger says he sees 40% will be COM modules, 40% custom systems, and 20% custom boards. “We assume that the COM modules will grow much faster than the custom side,” he said.
The Avnet connection provides the funding the expansion of nine production lines, up from six, and holding inventory for building the boards, but there are other advantages. “We also have the largest sales force in the market through Avnet – 600 account managers and FAEs calling on 30,000 customers and this is a huge untapped market,” he said.
The group has seen significant changes in recent months.
“When I took over 18 months ago we had everything in one organisation as Embedded Solutions. Now we have Tria for the COM modules and custom boards and systems, an engineering group with 170 software engineers and Avnet Displays, which helps manufacture in China and Taiwan for example for household equipment. Then there is the Embedded Platforms Group that includes platforms from Tria, Advantech and Kontron. They work with the suppliers, and they don’t mind whether they sell a Tria board or a Kontron board.”
Manufacturing
“Our manufacturing footprint is Germany for board and systems and Malta for boards and we work with regional contract manufacturers for local production,” he said. “This gives us a close connection between production and R&D, with external production for volume. We have more capacity coming into Malta as they were more focused on the EMS [contract manufacturing] business in the past.”
The COMexpress carrier board
The issue of tariffs on systems shipping from Europe may be an issue for US customers in the coming months.
“Going forward we need to provide people with more options. We can do system integration in the Americas via our system company, Avnet Integrated, it’s a very similar business. Our US business is just developing, its not huge at this time and that for sure is one of the growth markets. The expansion will be the America and Japan and opportunistically in Asia Pacific. Japan is very similar in requirements to Europe.”
“We have to see at the end of the day how these things roll out. We might also have to look at a local setup for local manufacturing, that’s to be considered but being an American company gives us leeway.”
Skills are an issue as engineers retire.
“So far we are ok in finding the skills but there is an age issue coming up. You will see us broadening our footprint from the majority of engineers in Germany, now in America, Italy and China. At the end of the day we will open design centres where you get the talent. On manufacturing with German apprentices we get well educated people to operate the machines and maintenance but you need to make sure you have an apprentice scheme, so we have a graduate programme in Avnet. We take 15 people per year out of 2000 applications over the last three years and we will scale this up as we are getting really good people. To get to 50 or 100 people a year it needs to be a well rounded programme.”
Growth
“The growth vectors are the regional expansion, more of a segmentation approach expanding the share of the 30 key accounts, and go for certain segments, both on industrial automation, robots rather than a standard COM approach.
“We do have AI capability but the AI discussions now remind me of the Internet of Things 15 years ago, there’s very little business, and you need to be prepared to invest. We need to get more into software and have it more standardised, but we do have software close to customers. They see the software on the module as commodity where they put their value on top, and we work with partners such as Qt to put software on top.”
This week he has made two senior appointments to strengthen its operations and grow key accounts worldwide as part of this move.
Kate Pritchard (left) has been named as the Vice President of Go-To-Market, leading collaboration with Avnet’s extended embedded and sales teams worldwide. With 24 years at Infineon Technologies in various sales and marketing roles, and additional experience in product marketing with UK distributor Future Electronics, she is responsible for strategically growing key accounts, expanding channel business and positioning Tria’s offerings in the market and supporting customers in terms of operations
As Senior Director, Business Line Management for Boards and Systems, Daniel Denzler is responsible for leading the Tria business line, which includes product management and technical support as well as the software technology lab. He and his team will drive the strategy to market and support standard Tria products, their derivatives, and customised versions of the boards and systems.
“One of the areas we think we can go more is construction and agricultural vehicles the customers have similar requirements for displays and computing, and similar standards. That means we can provide more and more building blocks to customers so they have to do less development work and they can work on what is the value,” said Sta
“You need to provide something to the customer that gives a generic solution that they can start tweaking otherwise it is very difficult to optimise if you are not in the application space.”
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