Future Electronics launches Future-Blox proof-of-concept development platform

• Technology allows multiple development boards to be plugged together like building blocks, dramatically reducing the time design engineers spend on component evaluation and proof-of-concept development -

Future Electronics has released a series of Future-Blox, proprietary evaluation boards that interconnect on a common bus to form a development platform for fast proof-of-concept development and system evaluation.

Development boards currently available from component manufacturers are designed as stand-alone units. It is both difficult and time-consuming for the design engineer to connect different boards together to model the interactions between components such as processors, communications ICs, power semiconductors, display drivers and man-machine interfaces.

Now Future Electronics has developed a method using a common bus interface and physical interconnect format to plug in multiple development boards featuring components from different manufacturers. Called Future-Blox, the new development boards will support third-party as well as proprietary development software as standard. This means that engineers can now begin to simulate, compile and debug software across a complete proof-of-concept or prototype immediately after plugging two or more boards together.

This common platform approach enables interoperability and flexibility across a broad manufacturer and application base, but is particularly suited to the industrial, instrumentation and control markets.

Fred Knowles, VP of Technical Sales at Future Electronics (EMEA), said: ‘It is becoming harder and harder for our customers to achieve differentiation at the hardware level – the clear trend is for OEMs to build differentiated software applications on more or less common hardware platforms.

‘Our development of the Future-Blox boards format is an innovative response to this trend, allowing our customers to spend far less time on developing the hardware foundation for their product, and to concentrate instead on application development – which is where they can really add most value and differentiate themselves.

‘Design engineers will be delighted to be rid of the so-called “Christmas Tree” process of stringing multiple development boards together every time they start a new project.’

Based on a 120-pin (expandable to 160-pin) bus standard, the Future-Blox format allows the developer to combine processing platforms with other Future-Blox boards covering functions such as power solutions, data acquisition, wired and wireless communications, man-machine interfaces and motor drive controllers.

The Future Blox specification provides for the following:

• Separate data and address lines scalable to 32 bits
• 3.3V-5.0V power rails (with scope for specifying 4 additional voltage rails)
• 15 control and MCU-defined pins
• 4 timers
• 4 interrupts
• 8 analogue lines
• 6 PWMs
• 11 GPIO
• I 2C, SPI, UART, USB and CAN interfaces
• 4 more undefined pins
• Integrated development environment (such as CodeWarrior™, IAR Systems, Keil™)

The Future-Blox boards, together with all associated reference designs, firmware and design files, will be supplied free on application to qualifying customers and prospects. All boards released in the future will maintain backwards compatibility with previous boards.

Future-Blox boards are available free to members of Future Electronics’ Board Club. Design engineers can apply to receive a Future-Blox development platform and join the Board Club by registering for membership here.