Posted By David Campbell
Embedded OEMs and developers often struggle with how to bring up hardware to quickly begin work on their overall solutions. Often, product requirements limit platform options and require extensive development time and costs. Windows Embedded partner Toradex has a great solution to this challenge. Toradex specializes in embedded hardware and software, and with Windows Embedded Compact, Toradex is able to provide solutions that can be not only used to quickly bring up your product, but also provide cost-effective hardware with which you can ship your product.
Toradex has a line of boards and modules that are both standardized and flexible. The Colibri hardware design scales from 208 MHz up to 1 GHz nVidia Tegra 3 and allows hardware updates by just swapping these standardized, pin-compatible modules. A very cool design! Standardization allows costs to be reduced, and it’s flexible enough to be used in a large variety of devices and industries, ranging from industrial automation and control to aerospace and medical. Toradex sells exclusively over the Internet and ships worldwide. And because of their redundant manufacturing facilities around the world, they can provide a reliable supply chain.
While Toradex makes great hardware, it actually provides end-to-end solutions. In fact, the company has engineered a very fast cold boot with Windows Embedded Compact. With a standard sample image, using the image defaults, cold boot on average takes 10+ seconds to load to a stable state with the sample explorer shell. With Toradex’s optimization, an image can load from a cold, zero-power state to having your application/program loaded in 480ms!
Toradex has attended and demo’d their solutions at a number of shows that I’ve attended, and I’m always impressed by the work they’d done. Great work, guys!
To learn more about Toradex, please visit their website.
In the future, I’ll spotlight more of our partners. If you are a partner, or have used one and would like to share, please send me a pointer. You can contact me at David.Campbell@Microsoft.com.