New Corporate Presentation

We are crossing another small, but important, milestone today.

We have our first Corporate Presentation online. Our goal was to outline, in this short pdf, what our plans are for Integral moving forward.

We hope it is going to shed some light on the business building activiting and allow our customers to get a better understanding of our motivations and plans to grow our product business.

The presentation can be found under the ABOUT US tab on the home page.

Good reading and thank you for your interest.

The new IT-CE410 Com Express Module

We are putting the final engineering touches on our latest ATOM Com Express module at Integral. We call this new product, the IT-CE410. 

Being an engineering-focused company, we have a very solid logic to support this product nomenclature (CE100, CE210, CE315), but we'll come to that at another time.

The IT-CE410 is a Com Express module, on what is known as the Com Express Compact form factor, specifically a 95mm by 95mm 8-layer PCB.

Unsurprisingly, we are enabling all the latest Intel features that this technology offers. Those features and benefits are described in an infinite amount of details at the Intel URL below:

http://www.intel.com/p/en_US/embedded/hwsw/hardware/atom-n2000-d2000/overview

With a power dissipation range of 3.5W to 10W, dual-core and, in some instances, dual-threaded CPU cores, we are starting to see an evolution of the ATOM chipset into new areas.

It is a bit of a dichotomy to think that this product family is pushing the low power envoloppe ever lower, but at the same time starting to show a feature set which could only be found previously in higher end CPUs, the so-called Intel "Core" product line.  We expect this trend to continue in future offerings.

Graphics capabilities is an area that Intel is clearly putting empashis on. The D2000/N2000 Atom CPUs support display port, HDMI outputs and even hardware-assisted 1080p capabilities. We are a far cry from the original under-powered netbook of 3 years ago!

On the CE410, one of the features we have added to the basic Intel chipset offering is the ability to support 4 USB 3.0 ports. USB 3.0, despite the arrival of ThunderBolt technology, has a bright future in the industrial world, for a variety of reasons we won't go in today, but we believe it was important to enable USB 3.0 immediately on the IT-CE410.

You will find more information on our new product on the Products section of our web site.

New Intel Dual-Core Atom Technology

Welcome to 2012!

The beginning of the calendar year always brings the CES show in Las Vegas. In a very direct way, this has an impact on our business strategy and product plans.

Even if Integral is obviously not in the business of catering to the consumer space, the number of units in those associated markets is so overwhelming and the product ramp so rapid, for successful products that is, that many of our suppliers never miss that opportunity to launch new products and annonce new technologies.

This year was not different. Prior to the start of CES, Intel formaly introduced on January 4th, 2012, the N2000 and D2000 dual-core, 4-threaded, Atom processors for the embedded space. Based on their latest 32 nm process technology, their Atom product line has always been positioned as the least expensive and least power hungry x86 platform.

If you were the draw a pyramid with cost at its apex, application areas and power consumption at the two other base points, you sunddenly find yourself with much bigger market opportunities for those companies, like Integral and others, actively integrating those chips. As you go down in price, the area in this pyramid is much bigger.

Better functionality and processing/watt performance equals more business opportunity.  For example, digital signage, smart cash registers, smart medical devices, battery-powered or hand held industrial applications, all begin to appear on our radar screen, something which was unlikely, or impossible, with the classical 25W, 50W or 60W CPU technology. I don't want to sound like Carl Sagan here, but there are, and will be, millions, if not a few billions, connected embedded devices, as we push into the low power areas with ethernet enabled connectivity.

We are not quite at the computer tablet yet, or very deeply embedded applications in the sub 1 Watt range, but we are relentlessly driving there, which is an exciting goal to have in mind, as we can solve new problems with technological advances.

All the technical information on this new technology can be found at the Intel site, where they always do an excellent job of promoting the products.

Integral is obviously positioning itself to try to leverage those new components, but that will be the subject of the next post.

Enjoy the Holiday Period

Despite the hustle and bustle of the end of the year, we would like to wish you and your family a good Holiday period. We all have pretty busy professional engagements throughout the year and I hope you can take advantage, during the next few days, to look after the people who are the closest to you and enjoy those special moments. Time is one of those incompressible thing...

During that time, we, at Integral, are upgrading our corporate offices in Laval and, while this renovation work will restart shortly after January 1st, 2012, our offices will officially be closed until Monday January 9th, 2012.

We continue to monitor phones, faxes and emails, so we are never too far away.

On a related note, with the annual CES show happening, just around the corner, in early January, we will have some interesting product information forthcoming.

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us at Integral Technologies. See you in 2012!

Breaking news *** General Member of the Intel Embedded Alliance ***

We wanted to finish 2011 the year in style, ...., and secure one more building block on our way to expanding our business.  This is why we joined the Intel Embedded Alliance this week.

Ihave not made the final count yet, as there are 160+ members of the Intel Embedded Alliance around the globe, but Integral Technologies is one of the very few companies in Canada that belongs to this group.

As we spread our corporate wings, we are conscious that we have local enterprises and high tech organisations righ around us, that we will be able to reach more effectively, with this additional "seal of approval".

Their business experience today requires the management of suppliers that have local engineering support, but more often than not, remote engineering sites and agents to meet their business imperatives. At Integral, we pride ourselves in providing the best of both worlds for our North American industrial customers, namely strong engineering, strong design capabilities and local presence.

Joining this group today is an important step forward for us, carrying with it, the recognition by a market leader of our capabilities.