As followers of QuickLogic, you no doubt saw a fairly significant announcement from us on Monday – that we’re joining the Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) Sitara™ ARM® processor ecosystem with our Camera Interface (CAM I/F) CSSP.  That announcement was the culmination of several months of architecture, development, and marketing efforts between QuickLogic, TI, BeagleBoard.org (the open source community that supports Beaglebone) and CircuitCo (the friendly folks who produce and distribute BeagleBone and the BeagleBone Camera Cape that has the QuickLogic CAM I/F CSSP).  And while the CAM I/F CSSP holds a lot of promise for our mobile enterprise and industrial markets, one needs to look under the surface to see why I am so optimistic about joining TI’s ecosystem.

Companies always have limited resources and must ensure that the lion’s share of development projects result in revenue generation.  We are no stranger to this ourselves – particularly because many of our developments are customer-specific (hence Customer Specific Standard Products!).  In fact, I’m often asked how we could leverage our precious R&D resources beyond just customer-specific solutions into ones with broader applicability.   This is particularly important when addressing highly fragmented markets such as the mobile enterprise and industrial markets where average customer volumes are substantially less than a smartphone.

Now, let’s talk about ecosystems.  We firmly believe that being part of application and baseband processor ecosystems is an integral part of our business strategy.  It ensures we are plugged into the trends in the market, and when done right, can expand our channel to a level not possible with our own resources.

How does this all relate to the press release about joining the TI ecosystem?  The non-casual observer will notice that I refer to this moment as our start of the catalog CSSP strategy.  What this means is that the CAM I/F CSSP developed in conjunction with TI and CircuitCo can be sold to anyone using the Sitara AM335x ARM processor, desiring an alternative to USB-based cameras.  One development, several customers.  That’s the power of working closely with a market influencer such as TI.  As the umpire says before the first pitch…. “Let’s play ball.”