Future Electronics believes it has stolen a march on its competition by becoming the first ARM Accreditation Corporate Partner.
The distributor has adopted the ARM Accredited Engineer (AAE) programme worldwide throughout the company, with a particular focus on the ARM Accredited MCU Engineer (AAME) certification.
“ARM products are proliferating in the industrial space,” said Steve Carr, vice president, engineering at Future Electronics. “When we saw this we talked about how we could differentiate our position and be relevant to the market, and most important add value to the engineering process.”
“We are ARM’s first Corporate Accreditation Partner, it is a flagship relationship with them,” Carr added.
To gain an Accredited MCU Engineer certification – which covers the ARM Cortex-M series of cores -Future’s engineer will 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.
Carr stresses the independence of this process – “This allows us to be agnostic in our approach to the engineering community,” he noted at the Embedded World 2014 exhibition in Nuremberg.
Future has 45 engineers going through the accreditation process – 15 in Europe, 15 in north America and 15 in Asia/Pacific. When they have achieved accreditation, they will become mentors to Future’s 300-strong engineering team worldwide and train them through a mix of face to face sessions and online. The process endows the holder of the Certificate with detailed knowledge of the ARM architecture, instructions and capabilities and of the practice of code development on the ARM platform.
“It gives us the ability to engage with customers at the core level. We can work with them to identify the best core for their application and we can offer them software and debug support,” said Carr. ‘Help from an expert in ARM products at the beginning of a 32-bit project can help ensure that design teams make the right choice of architecture up front, and to avoid the mistake of choosing an under- or over-specified core.”
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.
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