Countless industrial electronic assemblies are based on System-on-Module (SoM) concepts. The power supply is usually implemented together with the respective required I/O functions on a base board and the respective SoM is mounted in a special socket during commissioning. The SoM usually serves as the runtime environment for the entire firmware of the module. Apart from the SoM procurement costs, the dependence on the respective manufacturer is not uncritical, as the current situation of the supply chains has just made clear.
With the eDNP/8331, SSV now offers a 32-bit Arm-based SoM including Debian Linux operating system and firmware functions for headless embedded gateways under a licensing model as intellectual property. The SoM circuit is provided as a schematic and PCB snippet for the widely used PCB development environment “Altium Designer”.
The eDNP/8331 snippet can be extended with the required add-on and I/O functions as part of own Altium projects, and fully integrated onto a single cost-optimized base board. This significantly reduces any additional costs and EMC problems caused by connectors. The package also includes a backend function library with a Docker-based update server, digital twin and PKI security functions.
Jürgen Fitschen, the R&D manager at SSV responsible for the product concept, sees an application focus for systems with the eDNP/8331, for example, in the area of intelligent devices in building technology.
In his view, decentralized energy generation, monitoring of energy flows or management of energy storage systems require not only secure communication concepts with wireless IoT sensors and actuators, but also device-internal runtime environments with intelligent algorithms that automatically optimize energy demand and use.