As embedded systems become more complex, connected, and AI-driven, developers are facing growing pressure to deliver reliable products faster — without increasing costs or risk.
In this Q&A, Ohad-Yaniv from Variscite shares how the company approaches System on Module (SoM) design, long-term reliability, and engineering support, while helping customers navigate supply chain challenges and evolving regulatory requirements.
With more than two decades in the embedded industry and thousands of customers worldwide, Variscite continues to position itself as a long-term partner for developers building next-generation products.
Q&A with Variscite
1. For readers who may not be familiar with Variscite yet, how would you describe the company’s core mission and the value you bring to embedded systems developers worldwide?
Our principle is: “your vision, our solution.” Embedded development carries various risks and challenges – hardware reliability, software stability, regulatory compliance, supply chain continuity, cost effectiveness, and more. Our job is to remove as many of those risks as possible so developers can focus on what actually differentiates their product.
We’ve been a global leader in System on Module design and manufacturing for over 20 years, serving more than 7,000 customers across 70+ countries. All our SoMs are manufactured in-house, in facilities that are fully ISO 9001 and medical-grade ISO 13485 certified. This in-house approach gives us complete control over quality and the supply chain – a critical advantage when component availability becomes unpredictable, as many customers discovered during the COVID period and the recent RAM and Flash shortage. Regardless of the target industry, the use case, and the order size, all our products are of the highest quality and reliability.
Our ARM-based portfolio is probably the widest in the SoM industry, and we are an NXP Platinum Partner.
2. Variscite has been operating for over two decades. What has allowed the company to maintain long-term relevance and trust in such a rapidly evolving industry?
Twenty years in the embedded market has given us deep experience across many sectors: medical, industrial, agriculture, robotics, IoT, and more. Our customers benefit from that accumulated knowledge when they engage with us.
We also think of ourselves as partners to our customers, not just component suppliers. While a transactional relationship ends at the point of sale, a partnership extends through the full product lifecycle.
We release multiple software updates and patches for all supported operating systems throughout the year – Yocto, Debian, Android, FreeRTOS, and Zephyr – entirely in-house, without relying on third-party vendors. We provide free and direct engineer-to-engineer support and schematic reviews, and we guarantee the longest longevity commitments in the industry. Our in-house manufacturing also means we can manage supply chain disruptions directly, ensuring continuity even during global disruptions.
As an NXP Platinum Partner, Variscite customers get access to new NXP platforms at launch, not months later. Our SoMs are developed in sync with NXP’s product roadmap, which means customers can begin evaluation and development on the latest silicon as soon as it’s available.
3. System on Modules are at the core of your offering. What differentiates Variscite’s SoMs from other solutions on the market?
One of our most important differentiators is what we call “tailor-made off the shelf” – the best of both worlds. Fixed, off-the-shelf SoMs give you a proven, production-ready platform with established BSPs, certified hardware, and documentation from day one. Custom chip-down design gives you exactly the components your product needs and nothing more. Most SoM providers can’t offer both: their fixed configurations mean customers pick the closest match and pay for features they don’t need. Across thousands of units, the extra cost adds up. Because we manufacture in-house, we deliver both: a fully validated, production-ready SoM configured to your exact specifications, on orders as small as 20 units, so you get exactly what you need at the most competitive price, without the bundled overhead. That same in-house manufacturing is also what allows us to maintain ISO 9001 and medical-grade ISO 13485 certified production across our entire portfolio – giving customers in regulated industries the quality assurance, traceability, and documentation trail their end products demand.
Our Pin2Pin product families add another dimension, as customers can scale performance up or down across generations without redesigning their carrier board. This protects their development investment and gives them a clear upgrade path when their requirements evolve. We offer three pin-compatible families to cover a broad range of form factor and needs: the VAR-SOM family, the DART family, and our recently launched SMARC family – built around the widely adopted Smart Mobility Architecture. All three families share the same Pin2Pin philosophy: swap the module, keep the carrier board.
Software support is another core differentiator. We are the only SoM vendor that fully supports all major operating systems – Linux (Yocto and Debian), Android, FreeRTOS, and Zephyr – directly in-house, without relying on third-party vendors. This means customers receive several software updates per year, free of charge, for the lifetime of their product, with no royalty fees passed on to them. As CRA compliance and continuous security patching become standard requirements for connected products, this is increasingly a critical deciding factor.
4. How does Variscite help customers reduce development risk and accelerate time-to-market when launching embedded products?
The first thing we do is reduce what customers have to build from scratch. Our SoMs are production-ready and arrive with full BSPs, comprehensive hardware documentation, pre-certified Wi-Fi and Bluetooth modules, and extensive connectivity options. We also offer to pre-install the operating system, so evaluation starts on day one rather than after weeks of bring-up effort.
Our in-house manufacturing also provides a layer of supply chain resilience that directly reduces project risk. When a specific component becomes scarce, we can react and adapt faster than vendors who depend on external production lines, thus keeping our customers’ production schedules intact.
We also offer free schematic reviews of customers’ custom carrier board designs. Our hardware engineers review the design and flag potential issues before fabrication. Finding a problem at the schematic stage costs almost nothing to fix. Finding it after a board comes back from production is a very different story.
On the software side, maintaining full OS support in-house means our customers have continuous updates, including critical security patches, with no royalty costs and no external dependency to manage. In many sectors, embedded products are deployed for 10-15 years. Since we provide up to 15 years of longevity commitment for both software and hardware, our customers have the confidence of knowing we will keep their platform current throughout the product’s field life.
5. Engineer-to-engineer support is often mentioned as one of your strengths. How does this approach impact customer outcomes in real-world projects?
We don’t have a traditional “tech support” layer. When a question comes in through our support portal, it goes directly to the software and hardware engineers who actually design and develop the product. These are the people who wrote the BSP, validated the hardware, and know the design at a deep level. That directness has a practical impact on timelines. Most queries are resolved within hours, keeping customers’ projects on schedule.
We also take a proactive approach to prevent problems before they appear. Our engineers offer free schematic reviews of customers’ carrier board designs, identifying risks at the design stage – where fixing them costs nothing – rather than after fabrication, where the cost and delay can be significant.
6. Looking ahead, what are Variscite’s strategic priorities as embedded systems become more connected, intelligent, and AI-driven?
Three areas define where we’re investing: connectivity, edge AI/ML, and security.
On connectivity, Variscite was among the first SoM manufacturers to fully integrate Wi-Fi and Bluetooth directly on the module. Our current portfolio includes Wi-Fi 6 and the latest Bluetooth standards, and we continue to update versions across the range as the technology evolves.
The demand for AI/ML capabilities at the edge is expanding, and will continue to do so. Several of our SoMs already feature dedicated NPUs capable of running real-time inference workloads, and we support these capabilities with a complete software stack – so customers have both the hardware and the software tools to deploy AI in their products.
Security is where we see the most urgent customer demand right now. Regulations like the EU Cyber Resilience Act and US FIPS 140-3 requirements are creating compliance obligations that didn’t exist a few years ago. We address these on both hardware and software levels. Our newer SoMs include on-module integrated security elements with TPM and FIPS 140-3 support, and the same security capabilities are available as an integrated option on the carrier board for existing designs. Both are backed by full software support and step-by-step how-to guides, so customers have a clear, practical path to compliance rather than just the hardware to work with.
Security also shapes how we operate as an organization. Variscite holds ISO/IEC 27001 certification, which means customers can share proprietary design files, schematics, and confidential specifications with us knowing their IP is protected by verified, audited security protocols. For customers in regulated industries like healthcare and defense, it also has a practical compliance benefit: working with an ISO 27001 certified supplier reduces the third-party risk assessment burden in their own audits.
