Distributors focus on design services
By Jim Carbone -- Purchasing, 8/3/2006 8:00:00 AM
Buyers can expect electronics distributors to continue to beef up their design services offerings as electronics OEMs are outsourcing at least part of their design activity.
Purchasers who decide which distributors their companies need to look at carefully check distributors’ design service capabilities. Some offer application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and field programmable gate array (FPGA) and board design, while others are limited to being able to suggest which parts can be used in a design.
In addition, in some cases distributors charge for services. Distributors typically charge for ASICs design service, but not for use of field application engineers (FAEs).
Distributors say they are seeing increased demand for all types of services because more OEMs are outsourcing design for the first time.
“The market is very robust in the design area,” says Rafael Cruz, vice president of design services at Avnet. “We are seeing a lot of activity. Demand for design services is coming across all industries. We see mid tier and large tier companies who are outsourcing design to us,” he says.
A lot of activity centers on FPGA and ASICs for systems being designed by OEMS. In some cases, Avnet provides design tools for customers.
“We create tools to help customers in development, so they don’t have to do a lot of work themselves,” says Cruz.
He says there is strong demand for reference designs. Reference designs can include a whole bill of materials, Gerber files, layouts and source code.
Cruz says Avnet partners with outside design houses to design boards for customers, but Avnet will customize an existing board for an OEM.
While many distributors see an increase in demand from mid tier and larger OEMS, even smaller OEMs are looking to distributors for design help.
“In the past, only large companies with multiple projects would outsource some design. Now, it is the smaller customer,” says Theron Mackley, director of engineering for Arrow Electronics, based in Melville, N.Y.
He says across all tiers, “more customers than not are outsourcing at least a piece of their design.”
In many cases, field application engineers determine the services that the OEM needs.
In some instances, “our FAEs write a piece of code for some hardware or do a proof of concept layout that shows that the design works. Customers often don’t want just a reference board,” he says. “They want to see that the reference works and know how a piece of their intellectual property (IP) will run on it. We call that proof of concept rather than just reference design.”
Arrow also has a Custom Logic Solutions Group that handles FPGA and ASIC design.
Some distributors have design expertise around value-add services. An example is Jaco Electronics in Hauppage, NY. Jaco has a liquid crystal display (LCD) business which requires value-added services such as subassembly build and LCD modification to change brightness and viewing angles. Jaco provide technical expertise and design services around its LCD business.
Bob Savacchio, vice president flat panel displays at Jaco, says buyers may know just the size of the LCD they need, but there are other issues to consider. “They may need a specific brightness, specific viewing angles and the equipment may have to operate in certain environmental conditions,” he says.
A growing part of Jaco’s LCD business is design and manufacturing subassemblies for customers, says Savacchio.
“We are moving to subassemblies where we provide customers a drop-in solution to a display enclosure. We design bracketry for the enclosure and the whole unit is mounted,” he says. “So we design the mechanical configuration for the subassembly and we will manufacture it, too,” he says.
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