Software factory

Design-to-value

Accelerating the Pace of Innovation for Home Appliance Manufacturers

Our customer (anonymous by request) is one of the leading manufacturing providers worldwide, recognized for its electronic design, manufacturing, and supply chain services in markets such as automotive, appliances, wearables, and connected homes. They have recently launched electronic reference designs to provide home appliance manufacturers with an accelerated path to innovation.

challenge

Bringing a Faster Path To Innovation for Home Appliance Manufacturers

The company introduced off-the-shelf and adjustable electronic references to match a various of home appliances with minimum adaptations. However, front-panel display development was still costly and time-consuming process for most device manufacturers. Therefore, MicroEJ was chosen as a partner to complete this hardware platform concept with a matching, scalable software on-device platform. Its modular software technology allows software modules to be developed, integrated, and tested independently, opening the door to fast evolutions and adaptations.

MicroEJ in Action

Smarter Development Process and Faster Access to the Home Appliance Market

Faster Time-to-Production Process

The traditional product development process typically involves building and testing a physical prototype. However, this often leads to the discovery of design flaws, requiring re-design or reconfiguration, which can significantly extend the development schedule. On the other hand, virtual prototyping enables software development on virtual devices (virtual twins of real devices), effectively separating hardware and software development. As a result, virtual testing and design adjustments can be executed more easily, reducing both time and costs of development.

Reliability by Design: Future-Proof Products

Smart home appliances often have a reputation for becoming outdated quickly due to the difficulty of updating their software, obsolete connectivity protocols, security breaches, and a lack of added functionalities. Using MicroEJ’s technology, manufacturers can develop products with updatable software, ensuring compatibility with future technologies and improving overall reliability.

Leveraged Design Investment

With MicroEJ, software modules can be stored, shared, and safely distributed across different hardware configurations. This process is particularly valuable for IoT communication and user interfaces. Reused graphical widgets ensure a consistent brand image across different product lines, resulting in a familiar user experience that consumers of home appliance love and recognize.

This collaborative effort represents an industry first, as appliance manufacturers can benefit from a turnkey approach that delivers comprehensive design, manufacturing, supply chain, and product management services.
Benefits

Product benefits from MicroEJ

  • Dedicated appliance reference designs and ready-made software modules enable manufacturers to benefit from a packaged, simple-to-use solution, reducing time-to-market. On average, across more than 10 smart home or smart appliance projects, the launch of new products was three times faster than non-virtualized approaches.
  • Manufacturers can take advantage of cost-optimized, reusable software modules ready to be used on flexible hardware reference platforms tailored to their customer needs.
  • MICROEJ VEE extremely low-footprint virtualization technology allows for fast, attractive user interfaces and reliable edge-to-cloud and edge-to-edge connectivity through low-power, low-cost hardware, resulting in significant margin gains.
  • With over 20 million C/Java/JavaScript developers, building apps for heterogeneous home appliances is now as easy as developing for Android smartphones or tablets, requiring no retraining.