Reasons for Using Core Boards
When developing a series of products across high, medium, and low tiers, a common challenge arises: the main chips might be ARM9, dual-core A9, and DSP, with their respective operating systems being µC/OS-II, Linux, and SysBIOS. Not only are the driver codes incompatible, but the application layer codes also differ. Consequently, merely maintaining these disparate codebases consumes significant human resources. Moreover, developers, constantly burdened by this heavy maintenance work, find it difficult to focus on the product itself and discover new innovation points.
Traditional embedded development has a high barrier to entry. From hardware to software, from low-level drivers to various protocol stacks, middleware, and finally to applications, these are all essential skills for embedded development. For instance, using a new MCU requires reading thousands of pages of datasheets; using an OS necessitates delving deep into its principles and porting core low-level code; and for products requiring network connectivity, one must learn a wealth of communication technologies and IoT protocols (NB-IoT, Lora, Bluetooth, WiFi, HTTP, MQTT, LWM2M, TLS, etc.).
Many developers have likely experienced the painful process of building an entire development platform step-by-step, starting from the lowest-level register operations. Such projects often involve significant investments in human resources, materials, and capital, yet the results are frequently less than ideal. This is because we cannot be experts in every single aspect, and it's impossible to excel in all areas, naturally leading to substantial project costs.
Trying to do everything but excelling at nothing—this accurately describes the current state of embedded development. Furthermore, for a specific product, these technologies are merely foundational "tools," not the "core domain"; the product's true value lies in its inherent innovation. If developers must spend a significant amount of time and effort learning new technologies and knowledge before product development, it not only severely impacts development progress but also, as time passes, the initial creativity and inspiration are likely to be defeated and eroded by these technical details, making it difficult to develop competitive products. To address these pain points, after more than a decade of continuous R&D, accumulation, and refinement, Sienovo has launched a series of high-quality industrial core boards and development kits based on TI.