Techsol Services: Custom Design

Techsol is a world leader in Linux on ARM technology.
Leverage our off-the-shelf Medallion Computer Modules and development kits to accelerate your development projects. Whether you just need a Computer-on-Module for your own semi-custom design, or you need a turn-key solution, Techsol's focused Hardware and Software expertise plus superb support get you to market faster.
And our highly-integrated solutions provide the greatest value to maintain your competitive cost-advantage into production.

For high-volume products, we do both design and manufacturing for our clients.
Our team of experienced designers and engineers take pride in designing affordable, innovative, feature-rich and high-quality products!

A custom design is a single board that includes the circuitry of a Medallion CPU module plus the custom I/O and power-supply circuits.

Our business model is to offer design services at a low cost, and generate on-going revenues/profits from modest margins on HW sales. We do not charge any licensing on top of our hardware sales prices.

In a typical development process, after we nail down the requirements, we generate specs, and then build a big, 2-layer board with all the peripherals, and power it with a Medallion CPU module.
At this point, it looks like a semi-custom design, except that the layout is spread out to ease test and debug, and additional test connectors will be included.

After we have proven the peripheral technology (with any modifications, or cuts and jumpers as required) we will condense the design down to a single board solution.
We work closely with another company for the plastics design of the custom enclosures, if you should need one.
Together, we can create a low-cost product that exactly meets the customers needs, but save a big bundle of $$$ by basing the design on our proven platform.
And speaking of platform, out Linux is "pure" ARM-Linux with very minimal modifications. Mostly, we add device drivers, plus our boot-loader and debug/development support.
We also have a Sun-certified port of IBM's J9 VM available, although it does not have graphics (JAVA.AWT) available at this time (That is coming in the future).

As for performance, our roadmap includes a 400 MHz ARM-9 CPU in the near future (about 1/2 a year) which will bring us closer to desktop PC performance.
And on benchmark tests of 2D graphics, the ARM-9 processor that we use is faster than an Intel xScale processor running at almost twice the speed!

A fully custom board design varies depending on the complexity, and on how much new technology must be created. Typical costs range from around $30k for design and manufacture of prototypes to six-figure numbers.