Distributors offer more design services
By Jim Carbone -- Purchasing, 8/2/2007 1:34:00 PM
Lean design staffs, shrinking time to market and the need to lower costs are among the reasons that electronics more often are choosing distributors who offer design expertise.
Buyers find that design support from distributors varies widely. Larger distributors offer soup-to-nuts menus of design services. Other distributors may offer advice on a limited number of parts. Many distributors have field application engineers (FAEs) who provide technical advice about components. Others offer application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and field programmable gate array (FPGA) design expertise. A few have design centers staffed by engineers who are experts on specific vertical markets. Some large distributors have partnered with design houses to provide complex design services to OEMs.
Distributors say that many OEMs are looking for a total design solution rather than advice on which individual part is a good fit for a certain application.
“For instance, in the past we would have an FAE advise a customer on which 8-bit microcontroller (MCU) makes sense for a motor control application,” says David West, vice president, engineering and new business development, Arrow North American Components (NAC). However, today the customer would ask the FAE how the motor control application should be approached.
“Instead of coming in with a single part, we would come in with all of the parts and software and reference design and evaluation tools,” says West. “In motor control, it would include not just the 8-bit MCU, but all analog parts, passives, electomechanical, special software algorithms, that would be coupled with it. “We look at the design at the very beginning,” he says.
If you want to save money, you want to look at your system holistically, he says. “We have to start at the system architecture level, not on an individual part.”
Besides lighting companies, startups are also frequent users of design services. Startups often have very lean staffs and need design help especially in the selection of parts for a new product design. One example is Black Diamond Advanced Technology, a Chandler, Ariz.-based company that has just started to ship its first product-- a rugged ultra portable computer called SwitchBack.
The SwitchBack is a small three-pound PC that has desktop functionality. It is designed and built around military specifications to withstand extreme shock, moisture, vibration, and dust. “The device is ruggedized and will work in extremely cold temperatures or the scorching hot temperatures of the Middle East,” says Justin Dyster, co-founder and president of the company. Until recently, Dyster also handled purchasing at the startup.
“Dyster says Avnet provided a lot of design support as the SwitchBack was being developed. “Avnet supported us very well,” says Dyster. “They introduced us to technologies and new components that were more efficient and more flexible” than the ones the company was considering, he says.
“We would tell then we need certain functionality in a part and they would make recommendations,” he says. Avnet looked at the cost of the parts, how well the parts sell, to what degrees other companies were using the parts and it they had the potential to go end of life, he says.
He says Avnet advised his company on a wide variety of parts for the SwitchBack including inductors, capacitors, FPGAs, memory chips, hard drives and liquid crystal displays.
“The product would not have been here today in the timeframe we wanted without Avnet’s support,” says Dyster.
Mark Gsand, vice president of marketing for Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas in Phoenix, says startups aren’t the only companies that are using design services. More mature OEMs are also turning to distributors for design help.
“Distribution is becoming the OEM’s new best friend,” he says. “More and more, distribution is becoming that first call for our customers to come in and talk technology.”
Gsand says Avnet’s purchase of Memec helps the distributor support OEMs with more design expertise and services.
Gsand says the complexity of designs that use FPGAs and ASICs as well as software is helping drive distributor design services. “Design is becoming so complex, customers are looking for that unbiased technical expertise. Distribution has played that role on the fulfillment side. Now we are seeing that transcend into design,” he says.
Also see:
Distributors focus on design services
OEMs turn to distributors for design help
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