Carrier and baseboard design
The board your module plugs into: evaluation kits, adapters, and production carriers.
The module is the standard part. The carrier is where your product actually happens — your connectors, your power input, your sensors, your enclosure, your environment.
Three kinds of carrier, three different jobs
Evaluation carriers exist to expose everything. Every interface broken out, every boot strap on a switch, test points where a scope probe needs to land, and silkscreen legible enough that an engineer who has never seen the board can work it out at midnight. That is a good deal harder than it sounds: the moment you break out every interface, you are routing a dense high-speed board with no freedom to move connectors.
Production carriers exist to be cheap, small and manufacturable. Fewer layers, fewer parts, panelised properly, tested in-circuit, and designed so the assembler does not phone you with questions.
Adapters bridge standards — an OSM module onto a SMARC-format carrier, a module onto a Raspberry Pi HAT footprint — so an existing platform can be evaluated without a full redesign.
Interfaces we route regularly
| Class | Specifics |
|---|---|
| High-speed serial | PCIe Gen2/Gen3, USB 2.0 and 3.x, Gigabit Ethernet and RGMII, SerDes |
| Display and camera | MIPI CSI-2 and DSI, LVDS, HDMI |
| Storage | eMMC, SD/SDIO, QSPI and OSPI NOR |
| Industrial | CAN and CAN-FD, RS-485, industrial Ethernet, TSN, EtherCAT and PROFINET adjacency |
| Low-speed | UART, SPI, I²C, I3C, GPIO with proper level translation |
Every differential pair gets an impedance target, a stack-up that can hold it, and a fabricator who confirms it before the board is released. Controlled impedance you assumed is not controlled impedance.
The mechanical half
A carrier that routes perfectly and does not fit the enclosure is a failed board. Connector selection, harness and shield termination, mating cycles, keep-outs, mounting-hole tolerance and the thermal path all get settled early — on drawings, with your mechanical engineer, before layout starts.
Common questions
Straight answers
Can you design a carrier for a module we already bought?
Yes — that is the most common request. Send us the module's datasheet and pin-out and we will map it to the interfaces your product needs. We have designed carriers for SMARC modules, OSM stamps, Raspberry Pi CM format and flight-controller standards.
How long does a carrier board take?
For a straightforward carrier with a defined interface set, expect roughly four to seven weeks from agreed requirements to a fabrication package, plus fabrication and assembly lead time. High-speed density, rigid-flex or a compliance-critical design extends that. You get a task-level estimate in person-days before anything starts, not a range.
Do you handle the evaluation-kit case, where every interface has to be broken out?
Yes. Evaluation and development carriers are their own discipline — every interface exposed, every strap accessible, measurement points where you will actually need a probe, and silkscreen a stranger can navigate. Full-break-out evaluation platforms for SMARC and OSM modules are a regular part of our work.
Can you do rigid-flex?
Yes. We have designed a three-board single rigid-flex assembly manufactured at Eurocircuits, including bend-radius calculation and the stack-up transition. Rigid-flex removes connectors and harnesses from a tight enclosure — it costs more per board and usually saves money at the assembly level.