Technology

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20 May 2015

Nested design

By maintaining form factor across products and ensuring software continuity, nested design makes it easy for you to upgrade your products with each new generation of u-blox cellular modules.

In today’s electronics industry, particularly for industrial machine-to-machine (M2M) applications such as fleet and asset management systems, product cycles are short, typically 9 months to a year for each product upgrade cycle, with overall product life-span lasting up to 10 years. During this time, designers need to continuously improve their products to meet new emerging technologies and address regional markets beyond the scope of their original design. 

This creates design challenges, especially when upgrading the positioning and wireless modem components to cost-effectively address new market requirements such as extended GNSS support and compatibility with multiple mobile network standards, such as GSM, UMTS, CDMA and LTE. 

To address these issues in module-based designs, we adhere to a core "nested design" philosophy. This involves maintaining form factor and software continuity to allow customers to easily upgrade their products with each new generation of our global positioning and wireless modules. 

The key benefit is simple: as a product designer, you can stick to a single PCB designs for each new and improved version of our GNSS and wireless module products. Simply drop in the next generation module on your existing PCB footprint and start testing! 

 

Principal of the nested design

Note that "layout-compatibility" is a superior solution to "pin-compatibility," as the latter requires every modem to share the largest, most expensive package.