Spotlight On


What are the most exciting project you have been involved in during your career so far and why?


COMexpress. Now we see the same change happening where VME and cPCI are moving towards OpenVPX and we want to explore that trend.


This philosophy has focused Diamond


Point’s efforts in becoming experts in key areas, like baseboard designs for COMexpress, within the embedded computing market. This enables Diamond Point to provide best fit solutions to our customers whilst supplying outstanding support for their products.


How has the company evolved to keep up with changes in the market?


The company continually watches the trends in new technology and keeps abreast of emerging standards. Through evaluation of these new trends we have evolved to encompass the new technologies that we believe will keep us at the forefront of the embedded solutions market. By working together with Recab we significantly increase our engineering capabilities and this further enables us to understand the future requirements for Industry 4.0, IoT, AI and assist our customers in solving their concerns regarding the security and the increased amount of data that needs to be transferred. Over the years at Kontron and Congatec


I received many requests for embedded systems projects that were too small, or too specialised, to attract such manufacturers. It is my strong belief that there is a need for a local Solution Provider that can handle specialised embedded small or medium volume projects for OEM’s in our designated verticals.


You have in-house manufacturing capabilities. How have you found this benefits the company?


The in-house manufacturing capabilities have enabled us to keep control over the quality of the products we supply. Being the last part in the supply chain before the customer, it is important we ensure the product shipped conforms to exacting quality standards.


The in-house manufacturing capabilities also allows us to be very agile when developing and providing prototypes to customers, helping us reduce the overall product development cycle.


For instance, we have the capability to do temperature tests as well as airflow simulation. This means that we can move fast from concept to working prototype.


Why do you think Recab decided to acquire Diamond Point?


Recab is a Nordic company traditionally www.cieonline.co.uk


focused on embedded solutions for the Defence, Communications and Energy vertical markets. All these verticals are also strong verticals in the UK, therefore there is a lot of knowledge and capabilities that Recab can transfer to the UK and we can use at Diamond Point, to offer these capabilities to our customers. Diamond Point has traditionally been


centred on SBC and COM boards as well as custom carrier and box designs. Recab is interested in using these capabilities to enhance their offering to the Nordic market.


Becoming part of this new group means that Diamond Point has an increased financial strength and will be interesting to include in larger projects. We are now part of a £20 million company with 50 employees and the parent of both Recab and Diamond Point is the one billion USD ADDtech.


Are there any predominant trends within the market that Diamond Point International is responding to?


The customers are increasing their focus on their core competence. This is due to faster development cycles but also due to an


I have been involved a lot of projects throughout the years and it is difficult to highlight one. There is, however, a project that I have been very proud of as I sold the first ETX module to Swedish JLT around the year 2000. JLT is making displays for trucks and quickly understood the benefits of using modules to develop a ruggedised and easy to manufacture HMI. They continue to use computer-on-modules 18 years later and we are still in contact. Another interesting project would be the 3U cPCI train interlocking system for a Swedish train manufacturer using a segmented backplane. Due to the SIL4 requirements they needed to use three different processors and three different OS, together with redundant power supplies and a managed switch. For redundancy they then required two of each rack per implementation. The system is fanless and conduction cooled. Before the customer needed six servers and two switches to reach this functionality and we were able to greatly reduce the power consumption as well as moving the system from a 42U cabinet to a 20U.


You like to work closely with customers on products and solutions. How does this benefit your relationships with customers?


Working closely with customers is critical to mutual success. In the embedded market, a mutually successful product or project is the only outcome that can be seen as sustainable. Once the product is into series production, the customer and supplier need to continue working closely, not to wait for a change or obsolescence to drive more actions. It’s becoming widely understood that sustaining engineering through a


ATR Rack


experienced excellent product design failing to be successful, in ROI terms, due to price, positioning or timing factors. Working together, understanding the market opportunities as well as the product specifications is the best way to work and encourages further innovation. Understanding the use-case means suppliers can recommend and specify solutions with the right maintenance and upgrade characteristics to help keep TCO down and potentially enable higher revenue streams for the customer.


Do you foresee the market changing at all next year? If so, how?


Broad market trends such as AI, IoT and Virtualisation will have increased impact on customer requirements for embedded systems and solutions. Network time synchronisation, video over IP and implementation of safety-critical systems will be drivers for growth. Aging infrastructure on ISA or PCI based standards such as VME, PC104, ETX and CPCI will be replaced with new systems as more silicon vendors no longer support these buses natively. As we have already seen in some verticals, we can expect more end-users and operators to choose disaggregation of hardware and software. This trend may not follow through all embedded product and service areas, but the user experience and expectation will change nonetheless. 5G will likely not have significant impacts for end-user experience next year, but it will certainly generate more opportunities and demand for new designs or upgrades. We have been very successful in


A conduction cooled VPX baseboard design with a COMexpress module. Perfect as a small server or gateway for a mobile ruggedised application


aging engineering workforce and difficulty to attract young engineers in the verticals that has our focus.


Recab and Diamond Point believe that we must add value to the products we sell in order to assist our customers better. This value can be a baseboard design, adapting a system to fulfil customer requirements or integrating a variety of boards into a larger system and assisting with software integration. Furthermore the new high speed busses, like USB 3.0 and PCIexpress Gen 5 means that more customers decide to outsource the development.


product life-cycle can have a great impact on the initial ROI calculation than the initial R&D costs. This is particularly the case now more and more product life-cycles are going to, or beyond, 10 years from launch. Therefore, having a close relationship and value match with the customer, not just a compliance matrix or specifications sheet, is essential to meeting that customer's requirements with the right technical and commercial solution. Often, the key drivers for mutual success are not in the product or service definition, instead we look at factors such as time-to-market and collaborative design effort. We have all


Components in Electronics


introducing wire free, COMexpress based solutions, where we can adapt the connector interface to fit customer needs. This approach is ideal for systems which need to withstand shock, vibration and extremes of temperature and humidity during operation. These are characteristics we know make our solutions ideal for use in ground, air and sea vehicles, either for civil or military applications.


What do you do in your spare time?


Since I moved from Denmark in 2012 I have been living with my family in Hove. I really enjoy the UK and Brighton in particular. There is always something going on and people go out much more than we do in Denmark. Since the Albion’s qualified to the Premier League I watch their home games when possible. You might also be able to find me when I walk in the Downs.


www.dpie.com December 2018/January 2019 35


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