Accumulation, 15 years of hard work for Advantech's Arm-Based business

Since 2018, Advantechs Arm-Based business revenue growth rate has been above 50-80%. It is expected that in 2021, Advantechs Arm-Based business revenue will increase by 5 times compared to 2018!" Lin Siyuan, product manager of Advantechs IoT embedded platform business group, said confidently.

The reason behind such rapid growth is what kind of mysterious force contributed to this achievement?

Arm architecture is one of the RISC architectures. Compared with the large and feature-rich X86 architecture, it is short, compact, flexible, and has lower power consumption. It is especially suitable for use with specific application needs. In some industrial edge applications, such as terminal control, POS machines, robots, and the current explosive growth of edge AI, video data acquisition, and processing applications, Arm architecture has unique advantages, and the future prospects are promising.

Advantech, established in 1983, has been focusing on the design and development of product solutions for the industrial market. Its business is distributed in 27 countries and regions around the world, providing customers with convenient services for localized responses. Since 2005, the product solution of the Arm architecture has been introduced. In the 15-year development of Advantech's Arm-Based business, there are three important milestones:

In 2005, entered the game. Advantech, who has devoted itself to the industrial field, has sensed the new opportunities that the Arm architecture will bring from customers who have cooperated for many years. More and more customers began to consult Advantech about the development plan of the Arm architecture. In 2005, Advantech officially entered the Arm industry.

Take off in 2015. Compared with the mobile and consumer fields, the application of Arm architecture in the industrial field actually has a certain lag, and it requires at least 5-8 years of industrial accumulation. Therefore, adhering to the spirit of hard work, Advantech adopted a "squat" posture and began a 10-year construction process from product technology to ecosystem, and finally started to take off in 2015. This year, Advantech established an Arm-Based Product R&D Department in Kunshan, China. The team quickly expanded to more than 30 people, providing localized and high-quality technical support and services to customers in mainland China.

From Taipei to Kunshan and Shenzhen, the strengths of the two sides of the strait are assembled. Advantech has invested heavily in software research and development and technical support. The support for a single product line is more than three times that of the X86 single product line. In the future, it will continue to increase investment.

In 2020, it broke out. After years of product research and development and technology accumulation, around 2018, a large number of Advantech customersArm-Based business began to take off, and the acceptance of the Arm ecosystem has matured. Especially the emergence of chips with AI has brought Arm's products to a higher level.

With the new demands and opportunities generated by emerging markets such as AI, data centers, and cloud computing, the Arms industry is facing huge development opportunities, and Advantech has accumulated a lot of accumulation. According to Lin Siyuan, product manager of Advantech's IoT embedded platform business group, the annual growth rate of Advantech's Arm-Based business unit has been 50% or even more than 80% since 2018. From 2018 to 2020, in three years, the performance has grown 5 times!

The driving force behind explosive growth

The rapid business growth stems from Advantech's long-term technology accumulation and ecological precipitation. Lin Siyuan emphasized that "Advantech has been adhering to the original aspiration and dedicated ten years of hard work to provide customers with high-quality products and technical services."

In recent years, traditional industrial customers have transformed to the ARM architecture, and there are more and more customers from new markets. Based on the trust in Advantech's years of cooperation, customers can safely choose Advantech to help with digital transformation.

In addition, Advantech has a broader layout in mainland China and has continued to invest in service systems and customized services. Customers recognize the value of Advantech's products, and the advantages of the price system are fully demonstrated.

In 2020, the epidemic is raging, and the global market demand for medical equipment applications such as ventilators, rehabilitation devices, monitors, nucleic acid testing, and in vitro diagnostics has increased significantly. Advantech has also contributed its own strength in the battle against the "epidemic" by virtue of years of deep cultivation and broad layout in the field of medical applications. For example, in order to ensure the long-term trouble-free operation of the ventilators and the rapid supply of products, the important relief material of the epidemic Provides a stable, reliable, and high-performance Arm-based core board ROM-5420, and also provides strong technical service support in production and delivery.

The new life and work models brought about by the post-epidemic era, such as home office, distance education, etc., have promoted the development of related industries and stimulated new potentials. 5G, Internet of Things, gateways, cloud computing, smart cities, and other applications have accelerated and promoted This has helped Advantechs business development speed.

Advantech's RISC/ARM computing solution provides an open and unified development platform, which can reduce workload and improve resource efficiency when deploying Arm-based embedded applications. Advantech's RISC/ARM computing platform provides a wealth of core modules, single-board computers, and embedded computer solutions based on the latest Arm-Based technology to meet the requirements of mobile device power optimization and performance optimization applications.

Focusing on the industrial field for the past 40 years has brought Advantech a profound technical background. Lin Siyuan said that industry is like Advantech's DNA deep into the bone marrow.

Advantech uses different Arm processor platforms to meet the application needs of different industries, such as NXP that meets the characteristics of industrial applications, Rockchip that is suitable for applications in the Internet of Things and multimedia industries, and NVIDIA is widely used in the field of AI edge computing.

Advantech has a very rich product form, which is convenient for customers to quickly select and develop, including core modules of different standards such as SMARC, RTX, and Qseven; 2.5", 3.5", and Mini-ITX embedded single boards of different sizes; And smart gateway/industrial control host suitable for industrial Internet of Things and edge computing.

The original MCU support is difficult to be comprehensive and in place. At the same time, compared with the X86 industry, there are few suppliers that provide peripheral services in the entire embedded industry, which cannot meet the service needs of customers in mainland China. Based on a strong sense of service and adhering to the concept of providing customers with the most added value, Advantech attaches great importance to the construction of software ecology, provides technical service support for software and hardware integration, and provides one-stop technology for customers from product design, engineering verification, and mass production. Service support, providing advisory services to assist customers in the rapid development and implementation of applications.

Advantech provides flexible customized (ODM) design services for the Chinese mainland market, carries out product planning and development in line with the characteristics of the Chinese mainland market, and establishes a product development/service team in mainland China to help customers shorten project development time and costs so that Customers' products can be launched quickly.

All of Advantech's Arm-Based products have excellent software and hardware design quality and create products with high stability, high compatibility, and high production quality through margin design. In terms of design verification and quality control, Advantech has a complete design inspection mechanism and has been tested by professional CNAS qualified laboratories. It has complete test projects and industry experience. It has passed CE, FCC, CCC, BSMI, and various product certifications, and it is strictly closed-loop. Quality management guarantees the quality of the products and ensures that Advantech's products are suitable for long-term stable operation in various harsh environments.

Keep going, the future can be expected

The current main components of Advantech's Arm-Based business include traditional self-service terminals, rail transit, vehicle monitoring, medical care, and robotics. Traditional POS machines are transforming to Arm architecture. In addition, applications such as new energy storage equipment, the Internet of Vehicles, and smart cities are bringing new business opportunities.

In the future, Advantech will invest more resources and communicate with more manufacturers for cooperation opportunities. There will be more original manufacturers to join, resulting in more product forms, including modules, motherboards, and complete machines of various sizes and suitable for various fields.

Advantech will continue to use the product development, design, and production process that it has always implemented to ensure excellent hardware design and production quality; increase investment in software to strengthen customer service. The explosive growth ushered in today may just be a new starting point. Without stopping, Advantech's Arm-Based business has a promising future.