Success Story

Customer

Our customer is a manufacturer of high-quality touch panel computers. The modular expandable systems can be found in control centers for air traffic control, in industrial plants and in command centers in the field of public safety. In many areas, such as air traffic control or fire department command centers, the applications that run on the touch panels are highly safety-critical. Accordingly, the requirements for the end devices in terms of functionality, performance and, above all, reliability and durability are very high.

Project Description

For the production of the touch panel product series, the manufacturer has been using original DDR3 SO-DIMM modules from Micron, Samsung and Hynix since the start of production. Since lives may depend on the flawless functionality of the devices in highly safety-relevant applications, extensive testing and quali-fication of all components is necessary as part of product development. With the discontinuation of DDR3 modules and the switch to DDR4 from Hynix, Samsung and Micron in 2018, hardware manufacturers faced large challenges. Since the installation of other modules would have again required a time-consuming and cost-intensive qualification, the original modules had to be purchased at higher prices via the sports market.

Due to the discontinuation of DDR3, the touch panel manufacturer was suddenly confronted with enor-mous difficulties in procuring the required original modules. These had to be purchased on the spot market at the cost of massive price increases. In addition to the economic impairments, the effort in procurement became increasingly higher due to the constantly decreasing supply.

Challenges

• Well available module as alternative to already discontinued DDR3 SODIMM original modules in industrial grade quality
• Stable availability over at least 5 years
• Fixed BOM
  • No technical changes regarding chip versions in the availability period
• Guaranteed support with „one point of contact“ for analysis in case of technical challenges

Solution

In order to provide the manufacturer with a product that is exactly tailored to his application, we decided to assemble the modules according the Memorysolution Industrial quality standards. We exclusively used components from industrial manufacturers in order to ensure long availability without version changes. Thanks to our cooperations with numerous renowned IC manufacturers, we were also able to offer the customer an industry-standard second-source solution for testing.

Due to the required minimum availability over a period of 5 years, manufacturers with frequently changing chip versions were out of the question when selecting the IC supplier. The Taiwanese manufacturer Nanya Technology Co., Ltd. deals exclusively with the manufacture and sale of se-miconductor products and is characterized in particular by relatively long production cycles and a pronounced industrial focus. Especially during the ongoing „semiconductor crisis“, Nanya has dis-tinguished itself by good availability.

As usual with Memorysolution, we have decided to use an industrial PCB. These are characterized by thicker gold contacts than conventional PCBs. In addition, the board itself consists of 8 layers, which ensure a better signal quality as well as durability of the module

Thanks to an exceptionally broad line card, we were able to provide our customer with a solution that repre-sents a significant improvement over the initial state.

With the provided industrial grade module we can guarantee a long availability without version changes for our customer.