ABOUT

HOW WE DO IT

+Your Area Expertise and Business Requirements

Our Electronics, Firmware & Development Process Expertise


The Best Possible Electronic Product

We Have Great Experience

Hardware Design Experience

We've built and delivered over 350 board designs. Many of these have been tough mixed-signal designs that combine low-noise analog conditioning circuitry on the same board with high power motor controls, microprocessors and switching power supplies. We've built boards with every imaginable communication interface standard, and with a huge variety of internal power supply requirements. We’ve worked with single-chip microcontrollers, and with high power DSPs with high speed DDR2 memory interfaces. Most designs include A/D converters and/or D/A converters, and many designs use PLDs or FPGAs. We know electronics, we know layout, and we know how to effectively combine the two skills together to deliver an integrated, cost-effective and balanced electronics system.

Manufacturing Experience

Our board designs are economical to assemble. We've worked with assemblers to understand what they need to build boards with high yields. We understand tooling and board test procedures. Our CAD libraries have been created to meet the exacting ISO standards (the libraries that come with most board layout software don't meet these standards!). We have summarized what we've learned into a concise set of Design For Manufacturability (DFM) guidelines that we use for all our board designs.

Firmware Experience

When our designs include microcontrollers or DSPs, we deliver a test suite that demonstrates that all the design subsections operate as required. Often, clients will take these low-level hardware drivers and use them to get a head-start in writing their application code. On other projects, we'll write the final application program.

Component Knowledge

We've found that second-sourced components are easier to purchase and are typically 20% less expensive than similar sole-sourced components. Our custom component database highlights these parts to encourage our designers to use them.

Regulatory Knowledge

Every project we've built for the last eleven years has passed regulatory testing (including emissions) without requiring board-level changes. We have worked with a wide variety of standards, including IEC1000-4, 47CFR15, 47CFR68, EN50020, EN50022,EN50082, EN55022, EN60950, UL913, UL1950.

Project and Process Experience

We've done it before. Although we uniquely tailor each product to a client's requirements, we use a similar process for every job. We know what kind of problems can occur at each project stage, and use checklists, tools and procedures to keep them from happening.

 

We Work to Understand All the Design Requirements

We work to understand not only the requirements presented to us, but also the product history, the client's business, and where the client's competition is headed. Knowing more about the application takes time, but often allows us to use our design experience to:

 

We Manage the Project

 

We Use High Performance Design Tools

Using high quality Design tools helps us perform our work quickly, accurately and with great flexibility.

 

We've Created Custom Tools and Procedures

As good as our design tools are, there are many aspects of the design process that they don't manage. We've worked hard to codify and automate procedures to fill these gaps.

 

We Conduct Post Mortems to Improve Our Design Process

At the end of each project, we sit down and review how we did. If we find something that we could have done better, we update our checklists. If someone created a new tool or software program, we archive it so that it's available for future projects. If we've learned a lot about a design area or particular type of component, we make sure that this information is available to other designers.