Upverter for automation of SMARC carrier board design

4th March 2021

Alex Lynn

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ADLINK Technology has partnered with Altium and is now offering a fully automated SMARC carrier design process to its customers, leveraging Upverter, a web-based drag-and-drop designer tool. The Upverter tool requires minimal engineering skills, allowing customers to create their own SMARC based carrier board design within hours, and receive prototypes within weeks.

Upverter generates the electrical design files of fully custom-defined carrier board designs on demand, as well as an instant Bill of Materials (BOM) complete with pricing, a customised device tree, documentation, and mechanical models.

The Upverter tool is a core component of Altium’s cloud technology platform. As Ted Pawela, Chief Ecosystem Officer, explained: “Altium’s embeddable experiences can be added to partner websites using only a couple of lines of code. Upverter offers ADLINK’s customers a simple yet innovative way to bring new products to life.”

ADLINK’s design ecosystem called I-Pi SMARC can accelerate industrial grade AIoT/IoT hardware development with standardised modular building blocks and up to 15 years longevity. The design service is available for SMARC modules based on NXP’s IMX8M and i.MX8M Plus and Rockchip’s PX30. Accessible through ADLINK’s I-Pi SMARC website.

The ADLINK I-Pi SMARC modular approach to hardware and software addresses the aggressive timeline issue that customers face and has become the most challenging aspect of a professional engineer’s job. The I-Pi SMARC ecosystem combines industrial grade components, extreme software portability, and Raspberry Pi-like flexibility and expansion in a SMARC form factor. Fast prototyping and proof of concept are key milestones of a successful project.

“The Upverter tool is an innovative improvement of handling the proof-of-concept and prototyping phase for custom products. It will reduce the needed time to almost 50% in comparison to current approaches,” said Carsten Rebmann, Modules Product Manager at ADLINK.

Upverter is available through ADLINK’s I-Pi SMARC website starting on March 1st 2021 as a trial for interested adopters. ADLINK will release the tool for production later in 2021.