Standard architectures fuel board growth

A Venture Development Corp product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Feb 22, 2007

In the market for embedded computer systems, merchant suppliers are grabbing incremental market share away from the captive market, which is fuelling significant growth of the merchant market.

In the market for embedded computer systems, merchant suppliers are grabbing incremental market share away from the captive market, which is fuelling significant growth of the merchant market.

According to VDC's recently published "Global market analysis of embedded integrated computer systems (EICSs) and vertical market outlook", the merchant systems market will increase by 64% in terms of dollar volume from 2005 to 2010, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the same period equal to 10.4%.

The source of this healthy growth rate is a modest increase in market share of the total available market by merchant suppliers from 10.8% in 2005 to 11.1% in 2010.

VDC believes much of this growth is being fuelled by adoption of more standardised solution for board architectures and their critical subsystems.

The VDC study measures embedded integrated computer system shipments to the six major vertical markets for: communications, military/aerospace, transportation, industrial automation and control, medical, and laboratory/scientific.

Embedded integrated computer systems are defined by VDC to be any integrated embedded computer system sold as a partially or fully configured system.

This definition does not include board-level embedded products.

Unlike the desktop PC market, the embedded market has different dynamics and slower growth.

The embedded market does not support the volume required for drastic market transformation, because of long-end product life cycles for consuming products of these systems.

Rather than a market of uniformity of applications that can sustain high quantities, the embedded computing market is one of fragmentation and small volume shipments.

Interoperability is always a concern as well for embedded customers switching from proprietary architectures to standardised architectures that include even more mature bus architectures of VME and CompactPCI as well as newer AdvancedTCA solutions.