Hardware design

We can offer a wide range of hardware design skills and expertise. Where a new product is to be built as an upgrade for previously manufactured ones, or needs to interface to older products, we have access to an array of legacy CAD design tools and test equipment to make maximum use of the best of any surviving historical design information, complete or partial.

  • FPGAs —Although we have experience of Xilinx (and historically Quicklogic) devices, most of our FPGA projects have been based around either Lattice semiconductor families or the Actel product range from ACT1 OTP antifuse through to ProASIC3 flash devices with an embedded ARM processor. Actel devices typically give the highest level of design protection, whilst the A42MX family work well in older 5V systems. Verilog is our preferred HDL, typically realised though Synplify, and simulated via ModelSim. However, we have undertaken VHDL projects.
  • ASICs —Much less important as FPGAs performance and price continue to improve. We have designed IP blocks for use in large ASIC projects and small ASIC devices for cost and space sensitive applications. We have also migrated existing designs onto FPGAs after the original devices had long passed any last time buy opportunity.
  • CPU/DSP — We have designed microcontroller/microprocessor based sytems using Intel x86, Hitachi H8, Microchip PIC, Motorola 68000 family, and Actel embedded ARM. Also Texas Instuments DSP processors
  • PCBs. — We still carry out all our schematic design using Viewlogic ViewDraw and its sucessor Mentor DxDesigner. We can export netlists from this package to our preferred layout package Easy-PC
  • Hybrid Microcircuits— We have considerable experience of thick film hybrid circuits, old technology, but still in use. We have also created form fit and function hybrid replacements where integration of discrete logic into an FPGA means using PCB technology will deliver a solution
  • Mechanical elements — We can still provide some basic mechanical design support using TurboCAD under duress, but for all new designs our tool of choice is most definitely the Alibre(Geomagic) 3-D CAD package.