Advanced technology and small players

Integrated circuits (IC) vary widely in complexity from the small devices that are easily documented and understood to complex beasts that would require a stack of books and years to fully document.

If you are a high-volume manufacturer of consumer goods, you can easily get all the attention and support you need from IC vendors. They will help you design your product.

However, if you are a low volume manufacturer, it is nearly impossible to get direct support for complex ICs. Support resources are limited and IC vendors can't help everyone in the world design their products.

So they allocate support engineers to a small number of higher-volume customers.

It does not matter how important you think you are, or how much money you have, if you don't have volume, it will be hard to get direct support from complex IC vendors. Their margins are small and they make it up in volume.

However, there is a path forward for low-volume manufacturers.

You can buy system-on-modules (SOM) from vendors who do the hard parts of integrating a processor, RAM, power supplies, and other complex ICs on a module.

Additionally, they provide open-source software for these modules. Open-source has changed the game for software by providing everyone access to advanced technology.

The third aspect of this is community. If a technology vendor has a vibrant community around their products, then the community can support the low-volume customers. This is the best and most sustainable model.

The difficult part in all this is discerning where the line is. What technology is accessible to low-volume manufacturers and what is not?

A few red flags:

• SOM or other module technologies that don't have a clear support model for industrial customers.
• The technology is not open and requires NDAs to access documentation.
• The documentation is inadequate and difficult to understand. The only way you'll figure it out is by the vendor helping you.
• There is not a vibrant community around the products.
• Supporting software is not open-source.

The accessibility of technology today has spurred tremendous innovation. Open-source and community have changed the game enabling even small players to use very advanced technology in their products. But you must understand your limits. There is technology that is accessible to small players and technology that is not.

IC vendors who put the pieces in place (openness, open-source, and community) can benefit from the long tail of distribution, which increasingly is where innovation is happening.