Reference design refers to a technical blueprint of a system that is intended for others to copy. It contains the essential elements of the system; however, third parties may enhance or modify the design as required.
Reference Design Packages enable a fast track to market thereby cutting costs and reducing risk in the customer's integration project. Reference designs enable customers to shorten their time to market. In this modern competitive world shortening the design cycle and speeding up the time to market is the major challenge faced by Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
The main purpose of reference design is to support companies in development of next generation products using latest technologies. The reference product is proof of the platform concept and is usually targeted for specific applications.
As the predominant customer for reference designs are OEM's, many reference designs are created by technology component vendors, whether hardware or software, as a means to increase the likelihood that their product will be designed into the OEM's product, giving them a competitive advantage.
Read more about Reference Design: Examples
Famous quotes containing the words reference and/or design:
“A sign, or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)