Although our main emphasis is on FPGA design and development we have a good background in digital design and very close contacts with a Analogue and RF design consultants who advises on any critical design issues. It has transpired that few customers require pure FPGA development, most of our work involves developing complete solutions for customers designing the hardware to support FPGA functionality.
We have completed complete custom product developments and have advised many customers on hardware aspects of their planned developments.
We have experience of 64/32/16 and 8 bit microprocessor design, for example a design with dual bus masters one an Intel device (with Intel ‘std’ control signals), the other a Motorola (with Motorola ‘std’ control signals), with a processor clock speed of 40MHz.
Other designs have incorporated Gigabit Transceivers, PCIe, USB, ISA SPI, I2C interfaces, ADC and DAC convertors etc.
We have full Altium Designer capability and have a relationship with PCB manufacturers and a local high end assembly house for prototype to small production run builds.
A few examples of hardware we have developed are shown below. This web site is being re-designed, further examples will be included in the re-vamped site.
This is an ongoing project with a Medical Devices company based in Oxforshire.
A laptop base has been redesigned to include the iterface electronics for the monitoring devices their product requires. Our board uses an internal USB interface connection to a Cyclone 10 based board to drive the control interfaces to the interfaces and modules they are using.
The laptop battery powers the system so no current is drawn until the USB interface is elaborated, that then switches the power to the board, all necessary isolated controls and gaps are provicded for the approriate interfaces.
This design nas passed through several iterations as additional interfaces have been added, the laptop has been revised and to work round the shortage of FPGAs during COVID.
Permission is pending for a photgraph.
This board was developed over several requirement iterations with a London based client and is capable of recording all Freeview broadcast output.
The RF antenna feed is terminated, amplified/ attenuated then split into two feeds on the left of the board. These feeds both serve four RF modules, each of which contain RF tuner and demodulator ICs, producing a serial Transport Stream for each RF ‘multiplex’. The RF design was done with support from William Law of WRL Consultancy who provided critical input which ensured the RF aspects of the board worked flawlessly.
The Transport Streams are received by the Cyclone IV GX FPGA that buffers individual channels then DMAs the resultant buffers into the system memory vie the PCIe interface, over which it is also controlled and set up.
The Cyclone IV GX devices were the cheapest way of implementing a PCIe interface when the project started, we had Altera supported pricing for the expected volumes. The RF modules on the right were the first test of a new Sony chip set that could handle all worldwide digital broadcast standards.
We had redesigned the board to incorporate these and embed them directly on the main PCB when COVID hit. The guy behind this development was self funding but the resultant shortage of FPGAs (the older devices were least supported) killed the project.
The initial plan was to release the board above for integration into AV dedicated PCs but realising that many people would want a complete solution this QSeven format ‘motherboard’ was designed.
This incorporates the header with control lines for the QSeven module and all power rails derived from a +12V power input with switching converters, a hard drive mounted on the bottom of the board completes the system.
The following interfaces are driven from the QSeven header, PCIe, HDMI, 3* USB , SATA, 1Gbps Ethernet, terminations for an IR receiver.
This system was fully working with system / user interface software being developed when COVID hit and killed the project as above.
A Defence company based near Salsbury needed some elements of their system updated.
The Stratix III board here was developed and delivered in the agreed timescales, this sits in a PC104 board stack providing IO and control as specified in quite a detailed requirements spec.
This board is one of several used in a client’s product.
The board contains a Cirrus Arm CPU, Cyclone II FPGA, a 5A 48V motor drive, a +/- 12V 500mA motor drive, stepper drivers, digital IO, analogue sensing inputs, on-board temperature sensors, system thermistor inputs and an ethernet link to another board. This client uses a third party for PCB design but we guided component placement and did the entire placement and routing of the three switching power supplies with very satisfactory results. This is a fairly cost sensitive board so audio drivers were used on the +/- 12V motor output. This saved these have been performed well in all testing.
The FPGA design was split with one of the customers engineers who had experience driving the motor output, we implemented all the other functionality.
This is part of the electronics board stack we developed as part of a complete customer product design. This stack fits in a compact 1U enclosure and is based on an Cyclone FPGA based motherboard upon which the Single Board Computer and the analogue interface board sit. There are a couple more peripheral boards that interface with the motherboard.
This is an ongoing complete ground up industrial product design for a client. The product requires various different interface boards controlled from a central controller. Final I/O functional requirements were not defined when this design was started so all I/O boards have been based around FPGAs for flexibility. The communications between the various boards are via proprietary serial interfaces, with differential clocking for reliability. This has proven to be a flexible approach as the system requirements developed.
The board below is part of this large system and provides isolated control outputs and monitoring inputs with fault indication LEDs and reset switch inputs.
We have developed our EASY PCI interface board and core based on Altera’s low cost Cyclone FPGA family. Developing a custom PCI interface board with any amount of custom logic is not a trivial task. There are currently two possibilities, use a commercial PCI interface core in an FPGA or use a bridge IC and an FPGA. Commercial cores can cost thousands of dollars (an example is Altera’s 32bit 33MHz Master/Target core is $9K, target only $4K) and using additonal devices to implement a PCI bridge make board design/build more complex and costly. There doesn’t seem to be a simple, reasonably priced route for those who want to quickly implement a PCI interface board, whether for prototyping of production.
As you can see below, the board contains a Cyclone 1C6 FPGA, an EPCS4 configuration device, power regulators and headers to allow access to all pins not associated with the PCI interface. The board itself can be used for prototyping by connecting mezannine boards to the headers, or it can be used as the basis for bespoke boards by adding custom hardware/FPGA design. The board can operate stand alone on the bench when powered from a 5V supply.
A 3.3V surface mount crystal is included, connected to PLL2 to allow internal logic to be run at speeds of 20MHz * M/(N * post_scale_counter) where M = 2 to 32, N and post_scale_counter = 1 to 32.
The PCI interface core for the FPGA is initially a Target only core. The core has been designed to be as simple as possible to interface to and will be competitively priced, the price dependant on volume.
The Cyclone 1C6 costs < $15 in low volumes, so it will be seen that this will a very cost effective route for clients to implement custom PCI interface card design.
This has been superceded with our design experience with PCIe boards as above.
