I’d always treated cellular modules as building blocks. You choose the right one and let the manufacturer worry about everything inside the can.
This year I learnt that’s not quite true.
When DDR memory prices started moving, I didn’t give it much thought. None of our products use DDR, so I assumed it wouldn’t affect us.
What I hadn’t considered was that our cellular modem did. A component we’d never specified, never purchased and never even thought about suddenly became part of our product strategy.
That one discovery led us to re-evaluate our modem roadmap. In the end, we changed modem families, committed to around a year’s inventory of our existing modem to support products already in the field, and invested months of engineering in qualifying a new platform.
One unexpected benefit? The modem we’ve chosen for our next generation of products doesn’t rely on external DDR.
It’s a good reminder that no component is really a black box. Every module hides its own design decisions, supply chain and dependencies – and sometimes those become yours.
