Founded in Switzerland in 2003, Toradex today serves thousands of companies worldwide in virtually any industry with embedded computer modules. Toradex has grown to a set of international future-oriented companies with highly qualified and extremely motivated employees.
Mr. Sanjay Malla, CEO of Toradex spoke to EM about Toradex business, products growth, Key areas, focused trends and India embedded industry outlook. Excerpts..
Please share your company profile and overall business with our readers?
Founded in 2003, Toradex is headquartered in Horw, Switzerland, and maintains a global presence with offices in USA, India, China, Japan, Brazil and Vietnam.
Toradex specializes in designing, and making high quality embedded ARM® powered computer on modules (COM). Our products allow customers to cost-efficiently transform their ideas and concepts into successful products.
The products are highly standardized, yet fully configurable and scalable in performance and are used in countless applications across diverse industries and markets, which include, automotive, environmental monitoring, medical devices, gaming machines, navigation systems, musical instruments, virtual reality simulation, public signage, traffic control systems, building automation, security systems, robotics, and so on.
What are the products you are manufacturing and your key markets?
We, at Toradex, offer a wide range of highly configurable embedded modules which find their use in a diverse array of applications, across various verticals. Our portfolio consists of the:
– Marvell® PXA family, which is powered by Marvell® PXA SoC and runs an Intel XScale processor.
– Freescale® family, which has modules powered by Vybrid™, and i.MX 6 SoC running on ARM® Cortex™-A5, ARM® Cortex™-M4, and ARM® Cortex™-A9 processors.
– NVIDIA® family consists of modules running on NVIDIA® Tegra™-2, and Tegra™-3 SoC with multi-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 as their processor.
We see a good potential for our range of modules in segments such as – medical devices, auto infotainment, industrial automation, defense, energy and power sector, aerospace, logistics and transportation, and communications.
What is your product specialization and innovations in the embedded segment?
Toradex COMs are ruggedized, low-power, highly configurable modules which run on highly optimized multicore processors and advanced interfaces such as Gigabit Ethernet, PCIe, and SATA. Our modules are completely pin-compatible within a product family
Our particular innovations in the embedded segment include COMs which possess features such as Direct Breakout ™ technology, which allows the routing of signals directly from the module connector to outside world Input/Output ports, without crossing traces or traversing layers. In addition, our cold boot time of 480 ms for a Windows Embedded image is a world record for a COM.
Can you talk on the technology and trends evolving around embedded technology?
Going by the trends, the 32-bit embedded ARM® processor will continue to challenge x86 processors. The deciding factor in this field of technology is a low cost module which will deliver high end performance. Infact, the primary factors which will push the ARM® processors to control the majority share in the COM segment are definitely, low cost, low-power consumption, and higher processing speeds. The challenge here would be to re-engineer the products and select the right components. Selection of the right components and the right SOC partner is a critical factor which decides the long term availability and pricing of the module.
How do you see India market and growth percentage for embedded industry?
Wide usage of IOT, M2M, HMIs, MMIs applications will stimulate growth in embedded industry. These applications require higher / faster levels of processing and connectivity features. In addition, security features will be of prime importance and that will push hardware suppliers to design more robust solutions. In order to penetrate deeper into the market, we believe the deciding factor would be who offers more value at lower costs. Cost definitely remains the dominant decision making criterion in this industry, hence the selection of right processors for the COMs is very crucial. Going by the industry trends, we expect the embedded boards market to grow at a CAGR of 10% plus, while COMs will continue to be the highest growing product category with an estimated growth rate of 20%. In India, we can expect even higher growth rates as the category is at the infancy stage and is still evolving. With trends moving towards touch displays, high speed connectivity and ready to use hardware solutions, we are optimistic of a high growth in this industry.
Please tell us about your India design activities and academic support for India students if any?
Currently, we have a fully functional Design and Development team working on various new initiatives in Bangalore, India. Our development team is working on low cost solutions, customized for the India market, and at the same time offers support to our counterparts based out of Switzerland on jointly developing new generation products.
Toradex is also actively driving University programs wherein we would be setting up application laboratories in some of the topmost universities and engineering colleges across India. The idea here is to train young engineers at college levels on Embedded Systems, COMs, and related hardware, by providing them with working hardware platform environment, through which they can gain hands-on experience on embedded systems. We are in the midst of organizing seminars, and workshops, to various faculties and students across institutes in India.
Speaking of platform for young engineers, we also have our global initiative, Toradex Embedded Design Challenge, currently open for all engineering students, and technology enthusiasts. They can submit their project ideas, and once approved, they are given one of our module kits, for free, based on which they will have to complete their projects within a span of 18 months. The annual prize money is $ 100,000. The competition results are announced bi-annually.
What are your future plans for India market?
Going forward, we will continue to expand our operations in India, and bring in more investments into the Indian market. We have already expanded our operations in India with offices in Delhi, and Bangalore. We also have operations in Pune, Mumbai, Chennai, and Hyderabad. We are also working towards manufacturing the products in India itself, which can be done through an EMS partner. For this, we are already at an advance stage of discussion with some of the shortlisted EMS companies in the region.
For more details about company visit: http://www.toradex.com/
