ELECTRONIC DESIGN SERVICES
“It’s hardware that makes a machine fast. It’s software that makes a fast machine slow.”― Craig Bruce
The iLumTech electronic design team can offer you a comprehensive range of electronic design solutions and services along with our full and continued support. Starting with advanced hardware design and the design of various types of software, to the final combining of them together with a pinch of synergy added in, we are able to provide the system level design of a vast array of customer defined electronic products and solutions. All stages are checked and verified during various in-house tests, which we can also offer as independent services. Furthermore, we can assist you with our professional review of your own designs at any stage of their development. Our personal approach and high level of expertise throughout the whole process of transforming your idea to a professionally formed functional prototype, or any derivative of it, ensures you and your product will be first on the market.
Since hardware is the basis of each electronic device, creating a functional part of its physical body, there is vital need for good hardware design. Only well-designed hardware will ensure the quality, reliability, and long-term stability of a solution. Our hardware design engineers are responsible for the complete development process from idea to final product, and are keen to develop tailored solutions utilising the Altium Designer development environment, all within unbeatable timescales. We have extensive experience in both lowspeed digital and analogue designs, and the routing of printed circuit boards (PCB) with multiple layers. We are especially experienced in hardware designs tailored for the lighting industry. The hardware design process is a complex combination of tasks, decisions, and repetitions. With this in mind we follow well– defined internal processes together with ISO9001 documentation so that we can provide a fast and almost flawless hardware design process. And once the design is complete, we deliver a final product made using the very best components thanks to our wide network of cooperating partners and suppliers. They periodically provide us with the latest news from semiconductor industry and with important notifications, e.g. EOL, based upon which we have available to us state-of-the-art components along with full supplier support. Furthermore, our fully equipped R&D laboratories allow us to minimise the time taken to manufacture a prototype.
Programmable components are used in almost every electronic product found on today’s market. Even if only a trivial logic function is requested, a microcontroller unit (MCU) is usually chosen to be used instead of discrete components such as diodes, transistors or operational amplifiers. Firmware development requires close cooperation with the customer, especially when dealing with user interfaces, in order to design the device functions according to customer wishes. We have been dealing with firmware design for several years, and we have expertise mainly in ST Microelectronics architecture (both 8 and 32 bit cores). However, if required, we are able to work with manufacturers such as Microchip, Atmel, NXP, or any other. We have tight partnership with all the big MCU players on the market and their vendors, which gives us direct access to the latest technology available. Firmware design is closely connected with hardware design. Therefore, the two processes often start parallel to each other, which considerably shortens development time. The timeline that is required for professionally done and thoroughly tested firmware design depends on the complexity of the desired product. For instance, a simple switching function that depends on user input can be done in weeks, while the development of a network with tens of nodes communicating with each other will take months. In order to optimise development time we have at our disposal a library of various ready-to-use solutions such as PWM control, analogue measurements, buck/boost regulation, communication interfaces (UART, I2C, SPI, etc.), communication protocols (DC-PLC, USB, DALI, TCP/IP, DMX, etc.) and others. To achieve the creation of efficient and safe firmware we are using the standard MISRA C:2012 during the design process.
Labware is a specific kind of software that automates operations in laboratories or in industry applications, controls machines and measuring instruments, and acquires data and process it. Our solutions are based on the LabVIEW development environment, which enables short development cycles, user-friendly GUI design and a large number of libraries for data acquisition, data processing, data generation, mathematics, statistics, etc. LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench) is a development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. It is widely used for instrument control, data acquisition or industry automation. Another advantage is that all hardware provided by National Instruments is supported by LabVIEW and using this hardware, the development cycle is even shorter. LabVIEW-based applications are very useful in data acquisition, where data acquisition systems can be controlled via PC or can run as stand-alone applications. A large number of various measurement devices from different manufacturers can be integrated into the data acquisition system very effectively, making data processing a particular strongpoint of LabVIEW. A large set of functions for data processing and mathematical analyses enables fast implementation of the application. After acquisition and processing, data can be easily exported to reports. A very interesting option is connectivity with databases. To control fast processes, FPGA-based devices from National Instruments can be programmed by LabVIEW with outstanding performance. For industrial automation, LabVIEW offers machine control and machine vision. Another noteworthy possibility is the development of LabVIEW device drivers. With all these features, we are offering complete turnkey solutions for fully automated customer defined measurement and process units.
Electronic design is not always a simple task. The performance of an electrical device is influenced by many factors such as the selection of components, their combination and placement on the PCB, routing on the PCB, interference from the environment, ambient temperature, and many other factors. There are some basic principles that you can learn but the real master of electronic design firstly needs to be experience. Problems connected with electronic design are likely to repeat; therefore, you do not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ because we can solve the problem with you and save your time. Our team consists of highly-experienced hardware design engineers who are available to help customers build high-performance and reliable systems. We can help you to create custom designs based on experience and knowledge. Such support includes the provision of reference designs, detailed device and system design rules, design reviews and general advice. Integration support is aimed to provide customers with direct access to our engineers who can provide immediate assistance during the integration phase of a product. Typical problems faced are configuration, connection, system performance and general system behaviour issues, although we are here to help with any problems that may arise. Thanks to our well equipped, ESD protected laboratory we are able to quickly test and diagnose the source of a problem. Our long-term partnership with component manufacturers allows us to consult your difficulties directly with their application engineers, thus rapidly shortening the time needed to find a solution. Our engineers have a great amount of practical and real world experience that they are open to share with customers. We can also provide support via an email hotline, the phone or face-to-face consultation.