Critical Link designs and manufactures CPU, FPGA, and DSP-based System on Modules (SOMs) for industrial electronic applications. Our SOMs enable customers to bring products to market more rapidly and at lower cost than they could if they developed the entire product, from scratch, on their own. And we do so while ensuring the performance demanded in today’s industrial applications. We ship worldwide and are franchised with many of the top electronics distributors. Critical Link is a Platinum member of the Intel FPGA Design Services Network and Intel IoT Solutions Alliance and is ISO 9001:2015 Registered by SRI Quality System Registrar.

MitySOM-5CSx Gives Industry Leader a New Competitive Edge

Saab Sensis Corporation, a world leader in surveillance and information technology for the aviation industry, recently partnered with Critical Link to develop the newest generation of their ground based ATM sensor. This state-of-the-art product receives the signals transmitted by aircraft for the purpose of locating them in space. Saab Sensis used MitySOM-5CSx to jumpstart and accelerate development.

“We’d developed our own boards before,” said Chris Schierer, Saab Sensis Senior Staff Systems Engineer and Lead Engineer for the ground based ATM sensor. “It wasn’t a question of capability. It was a question of where we wanted to focus our resources. When it came down to it, we wanted our engineers to focus on developing our own industry-specific intellectual property – the things that would make us more profitable and competitive.”

Saab Sensis was first attracted to the 5CSx module because it incorporates Altera’s Cyclone V SX processor. Engineers were excited to discover the Critical Link module offered an embedded ARM processor in an Altera FPGA, all in the module that offers the RAM, interfaces, and other features as well as the support they desired. The Cyclone® V System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is a powerful, fully programmable hardware and software building block that significantly improves system performance via the high-bandwidth between the single or dual ARM® Cortex™-A9 processor and the Cyclone® V FPGA fabric.

Each part in the MitySOM-5CSx family is pin-for-pin compatible, allowing development teams the flexibility to quickly and cost-effectively meet customers’ unique requirements. The products are highly configurable, offering a wide range of technical features in a small form factor. Critical Link designed the SOM family with rigorous industrial, medical, and defense applications in mind, targeting long-term production with 10-15-year availability from initial release.

As with many Critical Link customers, the key reason Saab Sensis sought out a SOM was to make development of the ground based ATM sensor smoother and faster. MitySOM-5CSx exceeded expectations. “When our custom boards arrived, we were able to plug in the SOM, put our code in, and we were up and running in 24 hours,” recalled Schierer. “That is miraculous. There were people walking around the building with their jaws hanging down, saying, ‘I can’t believe we’re up and running on the first day.’” The MitySOM-5CSx family offers a wide range of processing densities, speed grades, and temperature options at competitive costs. Standard variants and development kits are available today from numerous major distributors. If a standard variant does not meet your specification, contact Critical Link to discuss developing a custom solution.