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Our expertise

WHAT IT TAKES

Our talents and skills

The projects we undertake vary widely. They range from feasibility studies through to the development of technology demonstrators and operational systems for our customers’ specific niche requirements.

We are frequently called upon to develop novel processing algorithms to solve our customers’ problems. Often we can propose new approaches which provide significant additional benefits which had not previously been considered.

SIGNAL PROCESSING ALGORITHM DESIGN

We develop novel algorithms to solve problems using a wide range of platforms including FPGAs, CPUs and GPUs. Using our experience in the implementation of high‑speed processing we are able to design algorithms which will make the most of the specific capabilities of each platform. We have developed FPGA-based signal correlation algorithms processing 2 GSample/sec, demodulators which scale across 40 CPU cores and adaptive filters which exploit the parallelism of GPUs.

RF SYSTEM DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

We have built wide-band multiple channel RF systems from 50 MHz to 40 GHz using a combination of off‑the‑shelf components, in‑house signal capture hardware, and custom developed antennas and modules produced in collaboration with our sub‑contractors. Our in‑house RF designs have included L‑band digitizers, 8‑way MIMO receivers, wide‑band transceivers and specialist test probes operating from DC to 25 GHz.

VHDL IMPLEMENTATION FOR FPGAs

As independent consultants we implement VHDL for FPGAs on a wide range of platforms designed in‑house, provided by our customers or bought‑in. We have experience implementing solutions for Xilinx and Altera FPGAs and develop code which can be easily ported between FPGA families. Our designs focus on making the most of the FPGA by careful design of the processing chain allowing solutions to be delivered in compact low‑cost platforms.

PCB DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

We design PCBs to meet the niche requirements of our customers which cannot be met by commercially available hardware. Our designs have included digital processing boards with cutting edge Zynq SoCs, 40 Gbps network interfaces and a wide range of peripheral components including M.2 PCI Express SSDs, GPS time and frequency references, cameras and six degrees of freedom inertial sensors. Our analogue and RF designs include signal chains to digitise signals up to 6 GHz, and the implementation of low‑noise control loops to tune YIG oscillators and filters.

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

We develop software to control hardware platforms, to capture data accurately, process data efficiently and present the results to the user in an intuitive manner. We write low-level C/C++ code to extract the most from multi-core SIMD processor architectures and Java to implement cross‑platform user‑interfaces and enterprise software components. We have experience providing complete solutions, libraries and components to support our customers’ developers, and Software Development Kits to allow our solutions to be extended to new applications.