YOUR SUCCESS
IS OUR FOCUS
You’re putting your heart and soul into your product. The idea, the market research, the look and feel for the user – all of it are a reflection of you and your passion. They’re a part of your belief that you can make the world a better place by providing people with technology to improve their lives.
So it’s worth making sure that it turns in a performance that exceeds your customer’s expectations.
In the technology space, applications get all the attention. And perhaps rightly so, since they’re the end of the system that the user sees. But for the app to function perfectly, everything below it — the embedded portion — has to provide a solid platform. No house ever got any straighter with each added story if it went up on a cracked foundation.
We do the parts of the project nobody ever sees — unless things go wrong, and the cracked foundation becomes the broken sewage line that is emptying into the living room.
Perhaps you’re familiar with the minutiae of what we do, and we don’t have to explain concurrent hardware-software design, device drivers, or programmable logic technology. Or perhaps this is all new to you, and you’re looking for an experienced guide to help you translate your vision into something concrete. Either way, you’ve come to the right place.
The place where your success is our Focus.
PORTFOLIO
CORE COMPETENCIES
FPGA/CPLD
Helping you build your portfolio of reusable Intellectual Property with:
Expert Design for Xilinx, Lattice Semiconductor, and Altera/Intel FPGA and CPLD product families.
Recognized factory-authorized “LEADER” design center for Lattice Semiconductor.
Thorough Simulation for all our Algorithmic State Machine design. We go into the prototyping lab knowing what will happen before anyone spends time and money "seeing if it works."
ANALOG, DIGITAL, & POWER SUPPLY CIRCUIT
Saving you time and expense by doing the hard stuff in Signal Processing, and Control Systems Design.
Mastery of SPICE, Laplace and z-Transform Theory, Stability Analysis, and Fourier Theory.
Deep knowledge of "green power" circuits and switchmode impedance matching techniques.
Extensive capability in development of embedded microcontrollers, particularly those that are ARM-core based.
Recognized as a Cypress/Infineon PSoC developer.
PCB LAYOUT, DESIGN & SUPPORT
Bringing half a century of team experience in all aspects of the Printed Circuit Board design cycle
Best Practices for Assembly, Cost Reduction, Traceability and Audit Trail generation
Layout for DDR2/3/4, LPDDR, modern PC bus standards (PCIe, PCI-X, etc.), LVDS, WAN serial, USB (1.0, 1.1, 2.0, and 3.0), Rambus, GMII, RGMII, and LPDDR, USB, Firewire, HDMI/DVI video, MIPI/CSI2, switching power supplies, low-noise analog circuits, and flex circuit design.
Manufacturability, testability, process variation, and FCC radiation (Part 15) compliance.
EMBEDDED FIRMWARE
Creating embedded system algorithms and device drivers (and API's for them) with:
Leveraging of solid configuration management for code reuse and an audit trail.
Complex time-critical algorithms (addressing hard deadlines as required) reduced to practice.
Integration or writing of drivers as required.
Operating system installation and (as is often the case with embedded Linux) pruning or extending to fit the target hardware.
SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
Solving the "hard math" problems early in the design; saving you time, money and people.
Figuring out the fundamental physics of problems to get them defined correctly. This often includes heavy analysis in the Fourier domain or with control theory techniques (Root loc
Working directly with Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors during your prototyping and Proof of Concept phases in order to secure you needed funding.
SERVICES
ELECTRONIC HARDWARE DESIGN
Modern hardware design must include software and programmable logic development.
It’s frequently essential to develop hardware and firmware simultaneously, since the needs of one may set the requirements of the other.
The line between digital and analog design has become fuzzy; successful product development incorporates both.
CHIP DESIGN
Economies of scale and manufacturability can guide technology development and selection.
Building a single custom chip can have significant cost and reliability advantages over building a circuit board full of non-custom chips.
Custom chips discourage intellectual property theft, particularly if they’re locked with a suitably long encryption key.
BOARD SUPPORT PACKAGE DEVELOPMENT
Applications developers don't interact with your hardware — they interact with the software API's that live below the app.
A good BSP for mediocre hardware will usually get more market traction than a poor BSP for excellent hardware.
With an unstable BSP, you'll spend time and money chasing problems at the applications level.
If your customer is the applications developer, he'll remember your bad BSP and avoid it.
SOFTWARE/FIRMWARE DESIGN
Applications developers are rarely embedded developers. Understanding how to build application software doesn’t translate into writing the driver that gets the most out of your hardware.
Determining which parts of your code are time critical is something that should be done at the outset of the development cycle.
A good user interface can be misleading. Code can look “almost done” when, in reality, there’s nothing under the hood.
When applications code is completed before the drivers or BSP are defined, that code may have made so many assumptions about what lies beneath as ultimately to be useless.
INTEGRATED SYSTEM & PRODUCT DESIGN
Most failed projects were doomed on the first day, when somebody defined the problem incorrectly.
Black boxes are great, except when you miss a subtle point about what's in them.
The really hard problems are solved with old-school math first and newfangled technology second.
20% of a feature set will get you 80% of the market. Pareto distributions are well worth considering when defining a Minimum Viable Product — and which are the features that really belong in Product 2.0.
HUMAN FACTORS DESIGN
Even in embedded design it's imperative that developers remember that there's a human user out there somewhere.
Functionality without usability renders a product functionally useless.
Good design is good from top to bottom, and the more the API between applications developer and embedded developer suits the needs of them both, the more likely the final product will be usable by real human beings.
MARKETS
DESIGN FOR CONSUMER MARKETS
Time to market is critical.
Disruptive Technology can come from anywhere.
COGS and NRE costs have to be balanced.
INSTRUMENTATION DESIGN
Instrumentation amplifiers, which are analog circuits, are your window to the world. Do one poorly, and you'll be looking through a fogged window.
Properly characterizing what you're measuring is critical to getting your analog front end and data collection system defined correctly.
Signals can be filtered with an analog front end or manipulated later in software. Knowing where to do one or the other depends on a solid knowledge of both analog and digital signal processing theory.
MEDICAL DESIGN
If you don't have an audit trail for your medical design, you may as well not bother doing it. Inadequate documentation is reason enough for the FDA to make you go back and do everything over.
Biological signals are usually low frequency and low amplitude. Knowing how to trade bandwidth for accuracy is often critical to making medical devices work.
If your medical system requires any kind of feedback control, "hacking code" to make a control loop work is a cardinal sin. You have to have modeled device behavior thoroughly or you will have set yourself up for FDA rejection at best and a class-action lawsuit or mass tort at worst.
INDUSTRIAL & CONTROLS DESIGN
Several highly complex forms of mathematics have evolved to describe feedback control.
A high percentage of people who attempt to design control systems have no idea that the math that describes them even exists - and they therefore can't predict whether they'll be stable or have acceptable transient response.
The more complex a software controls algorithm is, the less deterministic its time to completion becomes. For this reason, a complex software control loop can have enough jitter in it to cause a system instability somewhere else.
Sometimes mild system instability is actually desirable. But you have to know when - and how far you can push into the right half of the s-plane before you have a problem.
GOVERNMENT, AEROSPACE & DEFENSE
When you're 11 miles high, moving 19 miles a minute, reliability counts.
Predictability and repeatability matter enormously in military and aerospace applications, since in few other places is the cost of being wrong so high.
In military and aerospace applications, hostile environments are frequently part of the engineering system and need to be modeled as such from the beginning.
You can't design in reliability after the fact in 99.9% of all cases.