Cognimade is successfully working on new electronig designs while chip shortage and components unavailability on all distributors is creating problems to many companies and production lines.

Accurate components selections, fast firmware porting, and precise components purchases planning are 3 main steps we are dealing with.

Accurate components selections

Components are selected for their characteristics, but also for their availability, on the short period for the protoypes production and on the mid period for the mass production. Samples must be available in few weeks in order to have a short time-to-market without delays for the protoypying phase. For many components an alternative one is also selected with the same footprint, but also alternative components with different footprints are placed on the same prototype PCB if the space is enough.

Precise components purchases planning

Samples for the prototypes are ordered during the initial design phase, as soon as components are selected they are ordered. The mass-production is also considered with orders and pre-orders for the first serie during the first phase of the design, depending on the target time-to-mraket of the product.

Fast firmware porting

This is a Cognimade excellence, we can use all main micro-controllers manufacturer Integrated Development Environments, without limiting the range of choices to only few micro-controllers manufacturers. For example during the current chip shortage many ARM micro-controllers are unavailable, so on new designs we are selecting Espressif EP32 micro-controllers, they are cheap and fast, they have some limitations, but for many applications they are good enough. The Hardware Abstraction Layers integrated in the IDF framework is easy and complete, better than many ARM micro-controllers competitors, easing a fast time-to-market.