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Guides to carrier board development

Embedded design based on a COM Module and a carrier board is often a cost-effective strategy. The COM module is a bought as a standard product, verified and ready to be used in the design. Thus complications involved in hardware design for the processor and chipset are not your headache.

Thus there is room to concentrate on your product, its features and business in general. The hardware design challenges are limited to the carrier board where functions, components and interfaces needed for your specific application are placed.

Hectronic includes carrier board design in our semi-custom design offer to our customers. Some customers let Hectronic take on that responsibility and yet others develop the carrier board in-house.

These white papers are meant to support your design efforts with a carrier board for your semi-custom solution. We’d like to share some of our experiences and give introductions to the challenges involved.

Board layout and routing

This white paper is a guide for developers that are new to carrier board design. The purpose is to describe board layout, routing and calculations of trace widths and spaces to match impedance requirements. The example uses an ARM module but the guidelines are to a large degree generally applicable.

Power supply circuitry

The power supply is typically based on a combination of linear and switching voltage regulators. The former is uncomplicated and inexpensive but inefficient. The latter saves power but is somewhat challenging to the designer and costs more. This article is about designing the power supply on a carrier board.

Wireless ready-made modules

COM modules are not the only modules to place on a custom carrier board. There are various modules on the market for easier introduction of wireless functionality. Our suggestion based on experiences from working with wireless modules in a couple of automotive projects is to use familiar communication interfaces, ready-made drivers and certified wireless modules.