Critical Link designs and manufactures CPU, FPGA, and DSP-based System on Modules (SOMs) for industrial electronic applications. Our SOMs enable customers to bring products to market faster and at lower cost than if they developed it on their own. And we do so while achieving the performance demanded in today’s industrial applications. We ship worldwide and are franchised with many of the top electronics distributors.
Our team is vested from the start of every project. We know today’s prototype is tomorrow’s product launch, and that our success is dependent on that of our customers’. And because our engineering team is larger than many OEM engineering departments, we’re able to provide engineering support to developers designing in our modules.
Critical Link, LLC, is headquartered in Syracuse, New York and is privately held. The company began in 1997, and today is ISO 9001:2015 Registered by PRI Performance Review Institute. We are honored to be a top-tier member in many of our semiconductor partner programs.
Critical Link was founded in 1997 by four embedded systems engineering professionals. This was at the height of the almost universal shortage of engineers in the software and electronics fields. Our goal was to build a company that would help fill this gap by providing product development services to companies trying to bring new or updated products to market.
The vision was to become a completely virtual company. No central office, everyone works from home (at a time when very few people actually worked from home!). The internet was growing and we were early adopters of the virtual workplace. We believed it would become commonplace in the near future. For us, that future lasted 9 months – which was when our children came home for summer break and we brought on our first employees.
The shortage of engineers that was happening in the 1990’s grew with the runup of the Y2K and dot-com bubbles. Because of this, Critical Link found early success assisting companies with their hardware and software projects.
Then in the early 2000’s, a sea change occurred. The bubbles burst, the market suddenly had an influx of available engineering talent, and a trend toward off-shore outsourcing of engineering services began to take hold. We needed to re-engineer how we helped our customers be successful.
These conditions were the inspiration for the first MityDSP, and the invention of the System-on-Module concept. We productized a key portion of hardware design – the CPU subsystem – into a physical module. And the software team followed suit by developing a turnkey software package.
The original MityDSP, and subsequent product families, addressed the increasing need of customers to shrink product development budgets (both internal and external) and accelerate their time to market. We had identified a new way to help our customers achieve success! And in the years since we have seen countless other companies follow suit, demonstrating our concept as a proven way to help OEMs achieve success with their products.
During the summer of 2008, Texas Instruments was deepening relationships with a select number of electronic design houses. They were developing what was then the Texas Instruments Elite Design House Network, now the Texas Instruments Design House Network (TIDN) – Platinum Membership.
Of the hundreds of companies that were a part of TI’s long standing third party development networks, they selected the 12 most highly qualified. These 12 companies, which included Critical Link, were personally invited to the program by TI management. While the program has gone through many changes since that time, Critical Link remains a member since inception.
This relationship with a major silicon manufacturer was the first of many that Critical Link would develop. In the years since our entrance into the TI Elite Design House Network, Critical Link has built relationships with the four largest distributors in North America: Arrow, Avnet, Digikey, and Mouser. And we have developed a strong network of manufacturers representatives across the US. This network of partners acts as a force multiplier, delivering local support to our customers, and convenient access to our products, and our engineering services.
Today we continue working closely with our customers to support their development, production, and ramp-up. Whether we provide close-in software and hardware development services, or support them with one of our SOM products, we enjoy nothing more than to see them be successful with their business!