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System on Module (SOM)

A System on Module (SOM) offers a unique approach to product development and the often fully custom electronics typically contained within sophisticated devices. A SOM helps system designers realize a fully customized electronics assembly, complete with custom interfaces and form factor without the effort of a ground-up electronics design. Customers can purchase an off-the-shelf SOM and marry it to an easy to develop custom base board to create a solution functionally identical to one that is fully custom-engineered.  This method reduces product development costs while shortening time to market and technical risk. Critical Link provides a range of SOM offerings in its MityDSP family. The MityDSP is a series of highly-configurable, small form factor embedded CPU engines. These combine DSP and/or FPGA and/or ARM processors that are optimized for custom data collection and processing, and meet the needs of a broad range of scientific and industrial applications.

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The System on Module, which is sometimes referred to as a Computer on Module (CoM), is designed to plug into a carrier, or base board, and is generally a small processor module with a CPU and standard I/O capability. The complex effort associated with designing a CPU subsystem is avoided by using SOM functionality and a custom base board. There are two SOM families.

There are a number of benefits to the SOM approach vs. ground-up development. These include cost savings, reduced risk, a variety of CPU choices, decreased customer design requirements, a small footprint, and, since software developers can use off the shelf hardware with the same processing core as the finished product, the ability to perform hardware and software development in parallel.

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