Electronic Design & Development

We offer a comprehensive electronic design & development service and have the capability to provide a complete project solution where the deliverable is a working pre-production sample. We are also happy to provide more limited design services and to work within your existing development and production processes or simply to provide design consultancy and schematic reviews.

Our professional experience encompasses designs incorporating 8-bit micro-controllers through to advanced 32-bit embedded processors and high density FPGAs. We specialise in high speed digital design (now reaching 10Gbps and beyond) and the majority of our designs now involve multiple high speed serial interfaces. We are well versed in the latest incarnations of technologies such as PCI-Express, Gigabit Ethernet, SAS, SATA, DDR Memory, SDI video interfaces, USB and more recently Thunderbolt(TM).

Our primary schematic entry tool is OrCAD Capture from which we can export to most of the commercial PCB layout packages. Alternatively we can provide design entry using your in-house schematic capture toolset once the initial design process is completed. We are able, and happy, to work within the constraints of your existing parts inventory in order to minimize new component creation and to avoid component duplication which can often be a problem when contract design engineers become involved!

Since many of our designs now require careful consideration to signal integrity issues we no longer carry out any PCB layout in-house however we have very close links with a number of extremely good PCB design bureaux or can work with your in-house design team if desired. Where needed we have access to high end PCB simulation tools through one of our preferred PCB design bureaux.

VHDL Development

Many of our designs include FPGAs or CPLDs and we undertake a large amount of VHDL design work. We are experienced in both Xilinx and Altera development and are happy to undertake projects involving devices from other silicon vendors.

Software Development

Almost all of the products we design require some level of embedded software. This can range from very basic 8-bit micro-controller code to monitor a couple of GPIO lines through to complex real-time, multi-threaded systems running on high end embedded processors. We are experienced in the specification and implementation of such software systems and have experience in both open source and proprietary software development. In particular we have a detailed working knowledge of the open source bootloader u-boot and regularly use this as the basis of our board wakeup as well as for manufacture test processes.

We have a broad experience in both low level and application level software development and have been involved in writing hardware drivers for most kinds of processor peripherals. This experience includes development of individual modules such as display drivers, SCSI and IDE drivers, standard and proprietary network protocol stacks as well as fully functional operational software for networked control surfaces, audio disk recorders and digital mixers for example.

The majority of our embedded software development is, through choice, undertaken in C however we also have broad experience in C++ development. We are also happy to undertake more general Windows and Mac development which is sometimes a requirement when system test tools, configuration utilities and of course O/S specific hardware drivers are required.

Design Troubleshooting

We are experienced in taking on designs that are not our own and arriving at a final workable solution. This can be limited to fault finding a small area of a design or completing the implementation of an incomplete design where the original designer is no longer involved. We have in the past been through this process with complex designs that included multiple FPGA's, only partial VHDL and very little documentation!

Project Management