Micron launches industrial partner program

By Gina Roos, editor-in-chief

Micron Technology, Inc. further solidifies its support for the industrial market with the introduction of its Industrial Quotient (IQ) Partner Program. This new program builds on the company’s IQ Matters Program launched in 2017 to help educate industrial designers and purchasers about making smart solution choices for product design that takes into account the total cost of ownership (TCO).

The seven founding partners — Advantech, ATP Electronics, Greenliant, Innodisk, Kontron, Mercury Systems, and Viking Technology — share the same mindset around industrial product design, and that is delivering high-quality, rugged, and long-lasting products across industrial applications such as factory automation, transportation, and defense systems. It also addresses the need for greater collaboration in the supply chain in order to deliver the right solution across industrial internet of things (IIoT) applications, which extends across industrial verticals.

Each one of these suppliers has the same value proposition around serving the industrial market, said David Henderson, director, industrial segment for the Embedded Business Unit at Micron. “They need a memory provider that is invested and engaged in delivering solutions that enable them to deliver IQ Matters solutions.”

Micron has a very broad portfolio, but that portfolio is not sufficient to cover all of the requirements for all of the applications in the market, said Kris Baxter, vice president of marketing for the Embedded Business Unit at Micron.

Micron provides solutions, whether it’s a packaged product or wafers, that help its partners build products such as custom SSDs or custom DRAM modules while providing the longevity, quality, reliability, and ruggedness required for these industrial applications, he added.

The growing deployment of IIoT applications makes choosing the right industrial memory and storage solutions more critical for embedded applications, which minimizes the TCO for IIoT designs while ensuring long-term reliability and supply, said Baxter.

Educating the supply chain

The IQ Matters Program grew partly out of the need to educate engineers and purchasers on the TCO of using commercial-grade or non-industrial-grade parts in IIoT and Industry 4.0 applications. In many cases, Micron found that industrial OEMs were selecting solutions based on lower upfront costs without evaluating the TCO.

“Based on Micron’s experience over the last 30 years of serving the industrial market, we know that’s not the right answer,” said Baxter.

A couple of years ago, Micron kicked off the IQ Matters Program, said Baxter. He explained that it’s targeted at creating white papers and case studies, as well as demonstrating the TCO of using a non-industrial-grade solution in an industrial application and what that means in regard to things like the cost of requalification, downtime, and field replacement.

The IQ Matters Program also covers longevity support for supply because the requalification cost can be very high for customers, said Baxter. “They’ve told us that the cost of requalification is a lot more costly than the cost of the memory and their solutions, so trying to minimize that is the basis of our product longevity program.

“We also know that quality, reliability, and ruggedness is critical because downtime in the factory can be more costly than the cost of the memory solution itself,” he added. “In addition, things like application-specific optimization — whether it’s smart health monitoring or power loss recovery or things around cybersecurity — that allow our solutions to be more appropriate for the application leads to a much better total cost of ownership for the end user.”

Micron’s case studies have shown that the TCO is up to 10× more using consumer-related or non-industrial solutions in industrial applications. “The upfront cost might be higher [using industrial parts], but because customers don’t have to service the parts or do field replacements and these parts can operate in 24/7 environments, it leads to a much lower total cost of ownership,” said Baxter.

Micron built the program around five key tenets of design support to deliver a lower TCO for industrial products. These include:

• Ruggedized product enhancements to enable consistent performance across extreme environments, such as extended temperatures, thermal cycling, shock and humidity
• Design and testing processes to add a high level of endurance and reliability to align with needs of long-life-cycle embedded applications
• Extensive and rigorous quality testing to deliver consistent performance across products and processes necessary in embedded and mission-critical applications
• Extended life-cycle support for eligible products via Micron’s Product Longevity Program, which goes a step beyond standard life-cycle support to suit long-life applications
• In-depth understanding of use cases to deliver products and features optimized for specific application needs

Micron’s memory and storage solutions are used across a variety of IIoT applications, including industrial PCs (IPCs), factory automation, surveillance, machine-to-machine (M2M), retail, digital signage, smart grid, fleet management, and health care, as well as aerospace and defense.

“As you look at all of these different solutions — smart cities, smart factories, transportation, and surveillance — where there is a lot of data going to the cloud today, a good portion of the data is being collected, analyzed, and stored at the edge,” said Baxter.

This leads to the need for robust solutions that operate under more extreme and harsh environments, including those with high vibrations or cross-temperature requirements.

“All those things drive the need for advanced memory solutions, whether it’s DRAM memory modules, storage modules, or data storage solutions, that are appropriate for the environment that they’re operating in,” he said.