John Malboeuf, VP, Sales, DDM Novastar

How has the China tariff dispute impacted business?

2019 was the most challenging time for capital equipment in the industry since 2012. The industry experienced softness in the automotive market and uncertainty created by tariffs and international trade tensions wreaked havoc on the global supply chain freezing capital equipment purchases.

We saw Mexico freeze for a quarter or so when the new USMCA was called into question. We have seen China drop significantly over prior years with the trade tensions and 25-30% tariffs levied. With the recent closure on USMCA, we have seen a relief in the customer base and a resumption of CAPEX approvals in Mexico. We are eager to see if true recovery is first half or second half 2020.

How will you differentiate your company and technology?

Data I/O is the largest company in our industry, and has been for over a decade. One of the reasons we lead is that we consistently invest in R/D, during good times and not so good times. Throughout this downturn, Data I/O continued our heavy investment in R&D for new products and technologies to address trends in the industry and open new markets for 2020. These include faster programming technologies and support for new to world devices.

Will you introduce new products or expand into new markets?

As we spend over 25% of revenues on R/D, we are constantly introducing new products to address industry trends:

Dedicated high volume applications require a trusted programming solution

In November we announced the PSV2800. The PSV2800 is the latest addition to Data I/O’s award-winning PSV family that delivers up to 3,000 units per hour in production, making it ideal for high volume programming applications currently served by inflexible end-of-line solutions. Billions of devices are produced each year for the industrial controls, Internet-of-Things, medical and automotive markets. As production ramps, electronics manufactures are under pressure to meet quality, volume and cost requirements. The PSV2800 is an ideal fit for dedicated high-volume applications providing customers with the high performance and reliability Data I/O is known for at the lowest total cost of ownership.

Automotive industry continues the transition from eMMC Flash to Universal Flash Storage (UFS)
At productronica Data I/O demonstrated a 4x performance increase for UFS programming on the Lumen®X programming platform. Connected and autonomous cars are driving technology changes that are disrupting the automotive electronics manufacturing processes including the exponential growth in content, management of hundreds of software variants across a global supply chain and the transition to UFS flash technology.

Data I/O supports the transition to UFS with a high performance solutions that protects OEMs investment in Data I/O equipment. The combination of programming technology, PSV systems and software applications streamline the programming processes across the globe to deliver maximum production efficiency, quality and reduce costs that is unmatched by any other supplier in the industry.

Securing IoT devices manufacturing

2020 is the year of security. IoT security is moving from a must have requirement to a business enabler. The multitude of revenue generating applications and OEM product brands that must be protected requires great flexibility from device security hardware and software. In addition to flexibility, IoT and consumer electronics OEMs also need simplicity due to increasing time to market pressure. The best design approach for OEMs is to build hardware-based security into their products.

Data I/O's SentriX® enabled provisioning as-a-service for security ICs and microcontrollers is available through multiple franchise component distributors and silicon device programming centers. Throughout 2020 Data I/O will continue to enhance our SentriX security deployment solution with support for new semiconductor devices and collaboration with additional industry partners to enable a streamlined process from design to manufacturing and cloud on-boarding services.

Data I/O will build on our momentum from 2019 with a relentless focus to deliver programming solutions that are more cost effective, easier to use and enable any OEM to secure their devices in manufacturing.