 Hi, my name is Yves Asteyn, I'm Product Manager for FITECH MESS TECHNIC. We are here at Embedded World 2020 and I'll be giving you a small tour and showing you around what kind of topics we have. FITECH is a typical system-on-module vendor. We design system-on-modules as you can see right here, also on SBC carrier boards. The system-on-modules, we've been doing this as a core business for the last 35 years. We provide Linux operating systems and Windows CE based on these systems. We do all the driver implementation and we also take care of some middleware areas where we make sure that, for example, QT applications can be implemented. We also take care of preparing a development environment platform for you. For example, you will be able to receive a VM-ware that has all the pre-installed development tools. We also provide a lot of documentation to work with the software. In general, our strategy is to support mainline Linux if it's possible. For example, products that have been in the business for a longer time like AM335, IMX6 or IMX6-UL, those are products that are all mainline based. This means that our distribution comes directly based on mainline. This is a big advantage because you are independent of any distributions from the chip vendor. You can always take the latest kernel and make the system run based on this kernel. This is part of our long-term strategy where we want to make sure that customers will be able to run their products for a long, long time and also be able to maintain it and update the operating system. In those 35 years, you've had lots of different projects and your products are going all of the world. How about you? You're showing like a rocket. Are you in rockets? Are you in space? Well, no, I don't think we are in space but, for example, we are in a lot of other applications. In general, with the SOMs, we are addressing a broad market, so many markets. The usage of a SOM is actually very well for many different types of applications since we are just bringing out all the standard interfaces of the SOM and enabling the customer to use an embedded microprocessor in an easy way and in a fast way without a lot of experience for the high complex designs that typically the peripherals around a processor need. A customer can go to market very fast by just taking our SOM. We have taken care of adding the required memories around the processor, for example the RAM and the flash and we take care of files and power management, everything that is very complex in a typical embedded design. That customer can then just take this knowledge and take these pre-added values and do a simple carrier board design specific to their application and then just plug on the SOM and take the complex design of a 12-layer board and plug it on to a very not-so-complex design like a six-layer board or sometimes even a four-layer board. This saves money in terms of the PCB, for example, and it also saves money in terms of the development time that you spend in one of these embedded designs. So you work with TI, NXP, lots of different Rockchip. So we try to select interesting socks from the market. For example, this is one of the newest socks, it's an iMix 8 Quad Max, comes from NXP. This is like the typical flagship of processors right now with Cortex-A72 two cores and four cores Cortex-A53. This is actually, you can see it has 500 pins, so this processor has a lot of interfaces. You can use it, for example, for applications where you need a lot of camera interface, a lot of cameras connected, lots of displays connected and where you need a high percentage of processing power. What's the consideration you have when you design one of these? Are there other following industry standard formats or are you making your own? Well, of course, we come from the industrial market, so the quality of our system on modules needs to be at a certain level where it can be used in rugged environments. It must be certified in terms of EMC and EMV technology. We do regular tests in terms of stress tests in temperature. We do run timings, for example, they have to be very stable in order to ensure that the system runs stable at different temperature ranges. So we make sure that your system can be used in any kind of application that is typical for industrial environments or even in environments like transportation. We do certifications like ruggedized certifications based on train. For liability, they shake a little bit. Right, the liability and it's according to what the train makers need as requirements. So your boards are maybe in locomotives or in trains in general, what kinds of systems in there? Yeah, that's it. And what's the big news here at the show at Embedded World 2020, you're talking about future stuff also? Yeah, so our booth is kind of divided up into the standard products but also showing innovative topics. So what we are trying to do is we are trying to understand what the future for our customers is going to bring, right? And we try to create demos and figure out new technologies for our customers in order to be ready when the new technology is required by the customer. So for example here we have three topics all together and these work kind of together these topics. So we have one part, we have update and device management which takes care of updating the operating system that runs on one of our embedded systems. So we try to prepare updates capability of our systems and we like to maintain this updateability in our BSP releases. And we'll do a separate video about that. Okay, yeah. Okay, good, yeah. And then we have software life cycle management, maintained customer specific BSP from us at any time and it's actually independent of what kind of requirements in terms of Linux kernel versions are required or Yachto versions are required but I think we are also going to have a more detailed video about this. And yeah, and then we have security which is also a very big topic right now. There are many things that are happening around the topic security or many security acts that are actually trying to define the standards for security requirements and embedded systems or other systems in general and we are trying to bring the right answers and we are trying to explain to the customer how he can fulfill his security requirements based on his application using our hardware and using the socks that we provide on our system on modules. And then you also talked about AI. Yeah, AI. We also had a video about that, right? In general you can say that we are trying to understand what AI is all about and we are trying to follow the market, follow whatever is happening in the AI area and understand it and see how this comes together with embedded systems and we have an expert here. He is a data manager and we did an amazing 40 minute video with him. Okay, yeah, so you should watch that and listen to him. He really knows what he is talking about. It's a big topic, the AI in the embedded world. Yeah, it is. And you want to be in the forefront of that. Right. Exactly. All right. And what more do you have around the booth? Okay. In the beginning you were showing this robot. What was it? How is this made? What's the system here? Yeah, well this robot is actually a combination of all the things that we've kind of talked about already. It shows AI functionality, it shows visual inspection and it shows typical automation tasks. So, for example, so let me explain the whole thing. It's a full wins game, right? So we printed this with a 3D printer and we did all this design by ourselves using one of our system on modules and the thing is you play against the computer. You have the red balls to play with and when you insert the ball, a camera is going to analyze the current setup. And then you say, okay, robot, please move and according to the current setup, he will make a decision, he will use AI for that. And let you win. And no, he won. See, you can see it right here, he won now. Because I wasn't paying attention, I dropped the wrong ball or he actually had me check mate already because I could have put my ball here or here, I would have lost anyway. So it's pretty interesting. Yeah. And he uses AI to analyze the game situation and then makes this decision and then the robot arm is actually putting in the right ball and once you are done, you press reset and it's going to sort all the balls by its color and it actually also analyzes the color through the sensor right here. And so this is a typical task for automation and visual inspection. Yeah. And it's all running on just one processor platform. You do a lot of that. You do a lot of boards that go into kind of like automation and robots and stuff like that. Yeah. That's the typical market that we provide our products to. Yeah. Are your boards made in Germany or in China or? Yeah. We have production in Germany and I would say 90% of all of our boards and products that we produce are produced in Germany. Yeah. So that means high quality? Yeah. Of course, it means high quality. We can assure that the quality is always at the highest level because we have direct contact to our production. There are no long ways between development and production. So if there should be anything that can be optimized on our products, the information is brought back into development right away. And most of your customers in Germany or worldwide? Well, the customers are worldwide. We have subsidiaries in multiple countries, sales and development subsidiaries. For example, in the U.S., in China, in Shenzhen, we have in India a subsidiary. We have one in France. Yeah. I think that wraps it up. And the headquarter, of course, is here in Germany. Nice. And what's on this side of the booth? Yeah. On this side of the booth, it's more oriented on the customer-specific designs. So some customers, they like to buy just a system on module and do their own carrier board design for their applications. But there are also customers that come by and they say, no, we don't want to do the carrier board design on ourselves, but we like the idea of using a sawm as a start point and a quick start into my product. And so customers would require maybe the design of a carrier board. So they typically specify it for us. And then according to the specification, we do the carrier board design using our own sawms and therefore being really quick and also having the knowledge about how to design in the sawm and having the experience. And we did a separate video about the whole Ziphyr solution right here. It's very cool. What's going on here with the Raspberry Pi? We don't care if the carrier board design is based on one of our sawms or if it's, for example, used as a Raspberry Pi sawm, it doesn't really matter. And that's what we are trying to show, that we can also do designs based on that. Especially if a customer has already started prototyping on a Raspberry Pi and now he wants to do a design that is actually used for industrial use and really ruggedized and EMC tested and so on. And then he can still reuse his software and we can design a carrier board that he can then use in industrial environments. Who makes the Raspberry Pi sawm? Who makes the Raspberry Pi sawm? It could be other suppliers, right? Yeah. It can be anybody. And here's a FISIS, FI-CORE. Yeah, these are the sawms that we typically offer also for customer-specific designs. Which one is your top-selling one? Right now I would say the sawm with the most potential currently for new projects is the IMX 8M Mini, because it has a really great ratio between price and performance. And the feature set is also quite interesting, so it's good for a lot of applications. It's very compact. Yeah, it's also very compact, it's 40x37mm and since it's also soldered on with BGA onto the carrier board it's actually also not very high when you use it in your application. And then there's IMX 8M stuff? Yeah, IMX 8M is a processor that's also based on BGA PCB soldered on. We've added some Wi-Fi to the IMX 8M and it's very well suited for video applications. We've done some driver work for adding our camera systems, which we will see in a minute. I will show it later. Yes, and so this is also prepared for camera-based applications. And we look at some ST solution right here, STM32MP1, which we did another video about also, you have a solution there about this. We will provide this also as a BGA or with connectors, so you can choose which type of connection you would like. The STM32MP1 has a dual-core Cortex-A7, it also has integrated Cortex-M4. It's a typical industrial use processor, but it can also be used in other applications like HMI-based applications or camera-based applications. The advantage of the STM is clearly the software infrastructure. ST is very strong in terms of Cortex-M4 software library support, since they are coming from the microcontroller area with lots of Cortex-M4. They've built up a very large library, and this library can also be used with the Cortex-M4 that is integrated into this chip, in addition to the Cortex-A7, which is a typical microprocessor system. It can run a full Linux. And it can run, in addition to that, a full Linux, that's it, right. And the Linux is very well maintained as well. Five-board pull-desk. Yes, this is a typical carrier board that we provide with our songs. The idea behind that is that it can be used either in a series product, if a customer says, okay, this is pretty much what I require, and I would like to use all the interfaces that are already brought out, maybe use some additional interfaces right here with an adapter that the customer makes himself, or we have already prepared adapters. And yeah, these are actually designed to be ready to use in a series product, or the customer can just use it as a reference design. He can get the schematics and then just use it for his own design and take the song and design it onto his own carrier boards with the schematics already prepared. Nice. And at the other side here, you also have a bunch of stuff. Yeah, these are typical examples of designs that we've done for customers, customer-specific designs. For example, I think this is AM335-based design, and you can see right here where we've actually taken a standard SPC, single-board computer, like I just shown you, and we've added, on top of that, using the peripheral connectors, added another PCB that is customer-specific and brings out all the interfaces and holds all the circuitries that the customer requires in his specific application. So this is a typical situation where we've just based the design on a standard SPC. But we also have the possibility to do flat designs. For example, here we've just taken our experience of designing a microprocessor onto a PCB and I would guess this was done because of the flatness of the system that the customer would like to have a flat design and then we just offered the flat design for him and did this. This is an example with Idonomics 6UL, also a very interesting processor. It has rivet-edge soldering connections. The advantage of this is that you can also prototype with this saw by just hand soldering it. You don't have to run it through a reflow or something in order to prototype your first carrier board. We also do housing designs, so if a customer requires a housing we can do it made of plastic, we can do it made of metal, we can do the whole 3D design of the housing according to the specifications of the customer and we also have in our production team that will assemble the whole housing with the PCBs inside. Yeah, this is also hard. So here for example you can see that these are ruggedized industrial connectors that were required from the customer. And here I see a tray somewhere. Yeah, this is a typical device where from the company Bombardier they make lots of different types of trains and they make the internal communication systems and this is one example of a design where we have made these sandwich kind of connections of the multiple PCBs that are inside one of these boxes. And I don't really know what it's, oh okay, so it seems like this is a CPU card right here and then this is an Ethernet card and a UART card and I guess this is some sort of board system with the communication channels brought out. And this is also one typical example of what FITEC can do. In general, FITEC offers the customer to pull any kind of service card that he likes. So the customer can just buy a system on module, the customer can also get a carrier board design but he can also get the housing in addition and then get the full product from us. He will receive the Linux support for example. We can also do BSP specific BSP applications, adaptations and in this case the customer wanted the full on solution where we have actually designed the complete product in terms of hardware and also in operating system support. And so you can see this is a ticketing system typically from ground transportation so from public buses and this ticketing system will print out the ticket, do the payment, it's nearby the driver and the driver will also get information about his route so its navigation is inside GPS module and it will also apply the outside signs showing which bus number the current bus is driving under and what the next stop will be and so on. So everything is being managed from this system and FITEC is actually doing the full design, has done the full design, meanwhile this is the sixth generation of this product and we are completely assembling the product and then actually sending it to the end of the customer of our customers after we have applied the right software to the system. So this is kind of like the full on solution that we offer. Over there is a bunch of stuff but embedded imaging, what do you do with that? Created an extra team that has specialized on embedded imaging based on embedded modules and our embedded modules they have tried to figure out how do you do imaging on these modules and so one big topic is of course in industrial environments that you, when you need a sensor, a camera sensor, that this camera sensor needs to fulfill the requirements of industrial environments and for example longevity is one topic so typically our customers require a lifetime of a product of at least 10 years, typically even longer and so when you're looking for a camera sensor you can just go out and buy the next camera sensor that was used for example on a mobile phone because these will not be available for a long time. So we found camera sensors that are available for long term and we designed them on these carrier boards and we offer the applicable optics to go with it and we also show the customer how to choose the right kind of optics for his applications and then we do driver implementations in order to integrate these camera modules into our embedded systems and to support them under Linux for example. We've actually designed our own standards in terms of connection of these camera modules so for example there are typically camera sensors that have parallel camera interface but these parallel interfaces they are not very suitable for longer distances when the module for example the camera needs to be a little bit further off from the base system and therefore we've created an interface that is LVDS based and which is much more better because it's using differential signals and then much better suited for longer distances. So the sensor might be from Sony or some other sensor provider and you put it on the little board there? Yeah that's right. So yeah and on top of that we also try to prepare our systems even a little bit further for example here you can see here's the camera module with the optics on top and you can see yourself right now in the picture and so this is connected to what is it a FICO or IMIX 8M like I told you we prepared this for camera usage and we try to also look at the middleware that is required in order to do visual inspection for example Halken or OpenCV for accelerated visual inspection is something that we prepare and we look that these systems combined together with the camera drivers really work. All right. There are a lot of cameras in this corner here. Yeah these are the different types of camera modules that we offer. Yeah it's just different kind of flavors. Different resolutions. Different kinds of resolutions right color or black and white for example and also the different kinds of interfaces that I just mentioned are here also listed. FICAM-P, FICAM-S, FICAM-M, S for serial, P for parallel and M for maybe. And there's also a product over there we did a separate video about this STM32MP1 demo that you have. Right. Yeah we did a little demo here to show motor control usage and how it can actually do real-time tasks of controlling a BLC motor. So what's your plans for the future at the company? Is there a lot of expansion happening in the embedded industry and getting to a more global market? Well we're already globally set up pretty well. I mean we would always like to expand into all the markets especially also the eastern markets are interesting. In general what we want to do of course we want to follow up on the technology that is happening as I showed you all the innovative topics that are always interesting for us and we want to always keep an eye on that and in addition on that we want to of course always stay in close contact with the chip makers and always be on the innovative side also on the chips that we provide on our system or modules. And in addition to that services one big topic customers are partially overwhelmed with the complexity of embedded designs especially because technology is not stopping it's moving forward and complexity is getting higher and so we are very focused on supporting our customers to get help beyond just buying a system or module but also to get help from designing in their modules or just doing the software development.