CIE Components in Electronics
Future Electronics is to extend the scope of its ARM Accreditation Corporate Partnership to include ARM’s microprocessor Accredited Engineer qualification. Future became an ARM Accreditation Corporate Partner, the first distributor to do so, earlier this year.
As part of its partnership agreement with ARM, Future Electronics committed all of its field applications engineers (75 in the EMEA region) to gain the ARM Accredited MCU Engineer (AAME) certificate. To gain the AAME certificate, the engineer must cover a broad range of topics laid down in the AAME syllabus, practise the implementation of ARM-based designs and then demonstrate knowledge in an exam independently administered by Prometric.
According to Future the initial phases of the corporate partnership scheme have produced encouraging results both for the company and its customers. In particular, the deeper knowledge and understanding of the ARM Cortex-M cores which engineers are able to offer have proved extremely popular with Future Electronics’ industrial customers. Few small and medium-sized engineering businesses are able to devote the necessary time and resources to training their design engineers to AAME level, but the Future Electronics training scheme enables them to access specialist ARM core expertise as part of the distributor’s technical support service.
In the first phase of the programme, 45 Future Electronics engineers around the world (15 in EMEA) have been trained as ARM Accreditation educators. The company is now to extend the scheme, providing extra training to half of these educators to equip them to take the ARM Accredited Engineer (AAE) examination.
While the AAME qualification is focussed on the ARM Cortex-M series of microcontroller cores, the AAE qualification covers ARM’s A series of microprocessor cores. These are widely used in computing, telecoms and networking equipment.
At the same time, Future Electronics is already implementing phase two of the original programme, in which half of its FAEs will gain AAME status. This will be completed by November 2014. Phase three, in which the remaining half of Future Electronics’ FAEs will gain their AAME certificate, will finish by March 2015.
Steve Carr, Vice-President of Vertical Markets at Future Electronics (EMEA), said: ‘Customers love the new depth and breadth of guidance they are getting from Future Electronics’ engineers. It means we are able to help design engineers earlier, when they are making their choice of ARM core, and before they have chosen their MCU.
‘They appreciate the supplier-neutral advice they get from Future Electronics, which helps them to make strategic decisions about their design architecture with the benefit of a real understanding of the differences between one core and another.’
Future Electronics provides technical support to OEM customers using a broad range of ARM-based microcontrollers, including devices from STMicroelectronics, NXP Semiconductors, Atmel, Microsemi and Cypress Semiconductor. It also supplies microcontrollers using MIPS cores (from Microchip) and AVR (from Atmel).
