In recent years, Murata customers have placed increasing importance on differentiation and time-to-market in their product planning and development. They aim to create attractive functions that differentiate them from the competition and introduce those functions in their products as soon as possible. When evaluating a component, therefore, a customer product planner would most likely ask these questions: “What does it allow us to do?” “Can it provide new functions?” and “Does it enable us to plan new products?” This is why Murata has developed operational demo kits to allow customers to directly experience functions provided by Murata products. Such convenient tools could also inspire customer planners to plan new functions for new products.
Figure 1 shows some of the demo kits in the series developed under the name of “SysCube.”
Customer development and design engineers are different. They want to get a sense of the component function by seeing the component actually work and an environment in which they can evaluate the component as soon as possible. To use a sample that has been supplied from Murata, the customer needs to prepare a suitable peripheral circuit, a task that requires a significant amount of time and labor. Murata evaluation kits have been developed to eliminate this need. Each kit includes an evaluation board on which a Murata component and its peripheral circuit are mounted, and an operating manual. Using an evaluation kit and a PC alone, the customer can evaluate the basic characteristic of the component without having to prepare an environment. In addition, the kit allows the customer and Murata to exchange information obtained from the same source, ensuring reproducibility during subsequent technical support service operations and allowing for seamless evaluation/examination processes. Figure 2 shows the evaluation boards included in some of the Murata “SysBase” evaluation kits.
To provide a sense of unity, these demo and evaluation kits have been developed as members of special product series featuring uniform external appearances and system configurations. This sense of unity aims to forge customer confidence in Murata.
Preparing such kit series requires not only knowledge about the components in question, but also a broad range of embedding technologies ? including technologies for analogue circuits, digital circuits, microcomputer use, firmware, and application software ? which will become even more important in the future. Murata has established a special department responsible for such embedding technologies in order to accommodate customer queries and requests for support.