Canopi: How Our System-on-Modules Include Everything We Do

With all of that in mind: what’s to do? What sounds like the simplest solution is perhaps the most complicated – just procure off-the-shelf components at the lowest price, integrate them into your host system, and pipe data where it needs to go. Sounds simple, but in practice it’s beyond complex. Wireless components require careful hardware considerations and properly chosen antennas to complement them. They must be integrated into an existing host system which can be running any number of operating systems, let alone the kernel versions of those operating systems, which adds a layer of integration complexity. Components from multiple manufacturers don’t always play nicely with each other, and it’s not always clear whose responsibility it is to support your development, if at all. 

Getting to market is only the first milestone. Then there’s the next step: How do you support your design for 10, 15, or 20 years of future design cycles? How do you keep ahead of emerging security vulnerabilities, monitoring your Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) and issuing updates in the field? If 10 years from now, customers expect a completely different processor platform, the latest in wireless, more memory, or any other customizations, how does your business plan to respond? 

This is why so many OEMs choose to partner with Ezurio for their hardware designs. Ezurio has decades of experience in every corner of product development, serving customers in the most sensitive industries with connectivity-rich processing platforms that set them apart from their competitors. Now, Ezurio provides the industry’s most complete solutions as a leader in Connected SOMs: System on Modules and SBCs with wired and wireless connectivity that can serve as the host platform for your complete design. All of the above outlined concerns plague engineering teams of all sizes. But they’re an issue of the past when working with a single design expert whose combined strengths set the stage for decades of lifecycle management with security, scalability, and support baked in at the core. 

This is what Ezurio offers. For short, we call it Canopi. 

Canopi: All Our Strengths in One Comprehensive Offering

Canopi is a shorthand for everything Ezurio pours into every one of our Connected SOMs and SBCs, our collective strengths all pooled toward your product excellence. It’s built on our foundational support, product design, wireless expertise, and regulatory expertise, and encompasses our Connected SOM and Premium Wi-Fi portfolio that provide unmatched peace of mind for our customers.

Ezurio at its core is an innovator, driven by our engineering challenges and those of the customers we serve. Our engineering teams are passionate about improving every industry with the efficiency that connectivity and data processing brings, and we work directly with customers to make that happen. 

Our extensive history in hardware and software design, aided by our partnerships with technology, silicon, and services partners, enables us to give our customers a significant leg up in the lead up to market. 

Canopi is not a single hardware or software offering. Rather, it’s a way of describing how all of our capabilities, all provided under one roof, change the game for connectivity and processing solutions on our SOMs and SBCs. We look at it as a series of layers, where strengths stack on strengths to provide certainty in product design in a changing world and evolving customer expectations. 

Canopi in Layers – Value Added on Value

Where our competitors offer many off-the-shelf SOM solutions that share chipsets and features with our portfolio, none can offer the customizability, single-vendor simplicity, and future-proof support that comes from Ezurio’s combined capabilities. It’s not just a matter of Ezurio providing the most capable offering today – it’s the decades-long roadmap and custom design flexibility that gives our customers a sure and secure route to the future and a way to refresh their designs to ever changing market expectations. 

Layer 1: Connected SOMs

At the base layer of Canopi is our Connected SOMs. Even our off-the-shelf offerings, in distribution worldwide, represent an safe route for developers to a final product with a plan for the future. Connected SOMs serve as a complete host platform for your product, providing the storage, processing, peripheral access, AI co-processing, and all features needed to serve as your main board. If our preconfigured options don’t suit your project, they’re also completely customizable from top to bottom as a single board computer, yielding a platform for your design with everything you need, and nothing you don’t. And they lay the groundwork for your next design, and the design after that, with common form factors that can scale with your needs. 

Our Connected SOM strategy starts with form factor. Ezurio has adopted open-source design specifications like the pluggable SMARC (Smart Mobile ARChitecture), aligning a major portion of our SOM portfolio to this standard form factor for longevity and interoperability. Now and into the future, Ezurio is committed to expanding this portfolio to provide for the latest configurations that serve customer needs. 

With an established form factor, scalable capabilities come down to a broad choice of processor platforms. Our current SMARC portfolio includes NXP i.MX processors from the i.MX 8M Mini up to the i.MX 8M+, the i.MX 91, 95, and 93, and the MediaTek Genio 500 and 700. They’re available with customizable memory, temperature ratings, and (as we’ll soon discuss) multiple wireless options available. Our SMARC platform will continue to feature the latest and greatest processors and features as made available by our silicon partners. 

This is only the beginning of what Ezurio can customize for our customers. We can deliver all the way through to a completely custom Single Board Computer (SBC) that brings out those countless interfaces into hardware connectors, power connectors, inputs, LEDs, debug, and much more. We can create the perfect-fit design that precisely meets our customers’ requirements, and iterate with them as they discover new needs and use cases in future cycles. 

What does this mean? In short: Design today for tomorrow. Your current product may require a minimal processor, average wireless performance, or modest memory needs. But in ten years, your customers’ expectations may be very different. They may insist on a new or more powerful AI co-processor for predictive analytics, or greater memory to accommodate more concurrent operations. They may insist on faster processing, more processor cores, or longer battery life enabled by modernizing power management. Your next-gen solution won’t require a complete re-spin. Rather, select from the latest line of available SMARC or OSM modules, develop your software, and replace in your hardware manufacturing. Alternatively, provide new requirements and we can produce a drop-in replacement SBC to carry your design into its next phase. Common footprints and design principles mean a smooth path to cutting edge demands. 

This is layer one of Canopi, and it’s only the beginning. 

Layer 2: Premium Wi-Fi with Pre-Certified Antennas

On top of the core Connected SOM, Ezurio provides wireless hardware and antennas that give you broad choice in the type of connectivity you can support with the ability to change out in the future as your product story develops. This second layer of Canopi is the additional hardware layer that gives our SOM and SBC customers superior wireless choice with reliable performance and the peace of mind that future design cycles can adapt to customer expectations and demands.  

Premium Wi-Fi

Our broad choice of Sona™ Wi-Fi modules are part of the “connected” in a connected SOM. Where our off-the-shelf SMARC SOMs offer many wireless choices, this second layer of Canopi is built on our ability to customize to your demands, from the most lightweight connectivity to the most demanding, high-throughput, or mission-critical needs.  

Our goal is to empower our customers with the wireless piece of their SOM that most perfectly suits their needs. We partnered with leading providers Infineon, NXP, MediaTek, and Texas Instruments to create a line of five Sona families, available in 38 module options with multiple form factors, each of which addresses common needs and concerns that customers in all industries face when choosing a wireless solution. In our SMARC SOMs, our development of M.2 1216 standard SMT modules means that any SMARC SOM can be combined with any of our Sona Wi-Fi families.

We try and categorize these common needs or categories as the need for simplicity, low power, performance, utility, and low cost. Each of our Sona Wi-Fi modules targets one of these categories in an attempt to meet the many different types of connectivity that customers require. For example, in medical imaging, extremely high throughput is needed to move the captured data. That’s a performance need, one incompatible with low power or low cost requirements. For those integrating lightweight sensors into a factory floor, low power might be the most important concern. This is what we mean when we talk about scalability in Premium Wi-Fi. 

The “Premium” in Premium Wi-Fi comes down to our Premium Wi-Fi Advantage. It’s the collective name for our expertise in hardware, software, support, and regulatory. But what does that mean specifically for Wi-Fi? Among other things, it means feature support, capabilities, and integration tools that our competitors can’t (or won’t) offer. And that means major simplification for our customers adding Wi-Fi to an existing device (or even more so for adding to our SMARC SOMs). 

Finally, our Premium Wi-Fi includes our comprehensive Summit Suite Security Solutions. It’s a collection of three optional software solutions for the industries that need it most, particularly in sensitive industries like medical. They are: Chain of Trust Device Security, Software Vulnerability Monitoring and Remediation, and FIPS Cryptographic Modules. Our Chain of Trust enables layers and layers of security, all the way from signed hardware keys and bootloaders to user space and file system, which ensures that your device only runs software you approve and you trust. Our Software Vulnerability Monitoring and Remediation, enabled with the help of our partner Timesys, can identify components of your software bill of materials that have open vulnerabilities and help you remediate and triage emergencies in your deployed devices. And our FIPS Cryptographic Modules are FIPS 140-2 Level 1 validated to help customers integrate FIPS-compliant Wi-Fi for the most stringent of requirements, like those found in government and medical applications. 

Pre-Certified Antennas

As previously mentioned, combining components from multiple providers introduces uncertainty in the design process. As part of our regulatory approval process, we test and certify each of our wireless modules with multiple antenna types to ensure superior performance, giving our customers another layer of certainty in the route to market with known and repeatable results. 

Ezurio has been a leader in antenna design for over three decades, including our development of the first patented Flexible Planar Inverted F-Type antenna (FlexPIFA), uniquely tuned metal-mountable mFlexPIFA, high-performance embedded antennas for UWB, cellular, and much more. And like our other offerings, we customize these offerings to your needs. If you need custom cable lengths or unique mounting considerations, we can provide the hardware, testing, and tuning to ensure your design performs at its absolute best. 

Layer 3: Our Core Expertise in Action

All of our customizable and interchangeable hardware offerings are built on the same foundation: We’ve been designing for embedded development for decades, with a key focus on wireless connectivity and the development and regulatory challenges that brings. What that means is we have a library of lessons learned that we contribute into our products, as well as how we support our customers’ products. This makes up the third layer of Canopi, blanketing everything we do and most especially our Connected SOM offerings. 

Support+

Assume you went another route with another vendor, choosing an off-the-shelf SOM that meets your requirements and also integrates a wireless piece. Nobody else in the market does what Ezurio does by manufacturing BOTH the SOM and the wireless module, and providing extensive support for both. If your SOM manufacturer isn’t the same as your wireless module’s manufacturer, who do you turn to for support? In many cases, the SOM maker might consider that the wireless module maker’s concern. The wireless module maker may disagree. And either way, it’s your job to run back and forth between each in order to get to the root of your problem. 

Ezurio, by way of being that trusted single provider, can offer extensive support (which we refer to as Support+) for the SOM, the wireless module, and everything underneath. And in addition to our already industry-best support, we also offer SOM customers something we call Support+. It’s a priority tier of product support that includes all of our support capabilities with some key additions that make the difference for our customers. 

In addition to our extensive product documentation and direct access to product engineering, we offer additional support in terms of resources, testing, and product lifecycle management. We can offer custom programming at the time of manufacture, invite customers for on-site audits of our US-based manufacturing, and provide unlimited schematic and PCB reviews. Our test services team provide annual EMC regulatory updates and certifications for evolving radio standards, and offer free radio module host integration testing. And our extended Support+ adds 2 years to our product warranty lifetime for a total of 12 years warranty for exceptional product longevity. 

Certifications

Beyond just designing our own products for certification in global regions, Ezurio also has an EMC test laboratory that we’ve been using for years to help customers test and validate their devices for the market. And it’s anything but routine – we’re ISO 17025 and ISO 9001 accredited, equipped to perform complex FDA-required testing like IEC6060 1-1-2 , AIM 7351731, and AANSI 63.27. In short, there’s little we can’t prepare you for, and have seen everything on the route from concept to market. 

The process of securing regulatory approval can be daunting for first timers (and even for those who have been through it before). That’s why Ezurio simplified the process, with pre-scans and design reviews that prepare you for each step of the certifications process. We streamline the documentation and filing process to ensure all necessary documentation is completed accurately. And we also manage regulatory renewals, staying on top of the latest standards and keep your design ahead of legislative changes to make sure you’re not caught off guard by developing markets. 

Software Development and Partnerships

Ezurio has decades of experience in wireless design, and we’re able to pass on our lessons learned to our Connected SOM customers in terms of better-than-stock software offerings and feature sets. We provide all of this in our Sona Wi-Fi 6/6E families, with future families coming soon and with game-changing Wi-Fi capabilities due to our firmware access and partnerships with those silicon providers.

What kind of capabilities? Our Adaptive Worldwide Mode (the only FCC-approved algorithm for setting a radio’s regulatory domain by its location); enhanced roaming for complicated RF environments with lots of devices and access points; enhanced power savings and wake-on-wireless; an optimized supplicant for improved roaming, authentication, and driver interaction; custom firmware access to develop enhanced firmware for select chipsets from our partners. 

Ezurio’s software development gives you a secret weapon when it comes to enhanced connectivity. Our wireless modules do what others can’t, providing reliability, roaming, and enhanced control over your connection in the industries that demand it most. And the best part? This is all a standard part of what we offer. That excellence is our minimally viable product, and something that no one else can match. And because we’re one partner for your SOM and your wireless component, you can rest assured that it works together and is supported for 10+ year life cycles.

Canopi: Excellence Builds on Excellence

To sum all of this up: Canopi is the complete total of all our expertise, development, experience, and hardware versatility. Working with us as your single provider for your complete hardware design means more than just compatibility and simplicity – it means we have your product completely covered at every step. It starts with flexible and upgradeable hardware, covered by uniquely custom software features, extends through to regulatory compliance and pre-certified antennas, and follows through over a decade of post-deployment support. Ezurio offers a comprehensive hardware roadmap that nobody else can match. 

Teams big and small in every industry can leverage our decades in the industry to create products that hit the market running, survive a complex world of software vulnerabilities and changing requirements, and ultimately swim through subsequent design cycles with ease. This is what makes Ezurio your connectivity expert. 

Learn more about our Canopi offerings, customizeability, and the complete ecosystem at: 

https://www.ezurio.com/system-on-module/canopi