Customers // Case Studies - Dedicated Devices
Dedicated Devices, Inc. (DDi) provides innovative and easy-to-use digital home entertainment and networking solutions to the digital home market. DDi was seeking a partner to develop its Intel IXP425-based Digital Distribution Center (DDC) – the central device in its system – meeting aggressive BOM cost, development cost, reliability and time to market requirements. Outsourcing the DDC hardware and Linux board support package development allowed DDi to focus its critical internal resources on core efforts including application software development. DDi also required access to the design source and manufacturing package, so it could manufacture the DDC directly on an ongoing basis.
The Challenge:
DDI asked ADI to design the DDC: the core media gateway, server and storage device that enables content to be viewed or listened to on any entertainment system in the home - either from the PC or from the DDC's internal storage. Combining the functions of digital photo archive, digital music jukebox and digital video server, the DDC allows homeowners to easily organize, access, control and enjoy digital photos, music and video - from any number of sources - in any outfitted room in the home. On the networking side, the DDC functions as a residential gateway with commercial-grade firewall protection and network-attached storage. The unique modular design of the DDC allows it to be placed where it should be: in a wired home's Structured Media(tm) Center.
“ADI is among the very best partners we have ever worked with,” said Jonathan Weech, Co-Founder and VP of Products at DDi. “The ADI team far exceeded our expectations, and they were meticulous about seeing to our success.”
The Solution:
ADI optimized cost and mitigated risk by designing the DDC as a derivative of its Coyote reference platform. ADI leveraged its Coyote reference platform to achieve a significantly expedited design cycle and NRE cost reduction. ADI added features to Coyote from its library of pre-validated building blocks, including a nine-port fast Ethernet switch, high-performance IDE interface, and a USB 2.0 host controller. ADI delivered a complete manufacturing package including all design collateral as well as manufacturing test procedures and test vectors it developed.
The product was awarded the Consumer Electronics Association Mark of Excellence award for Structured Wiring Distribution Device of the Year in 2005.