Our Hardware Services

What Can We Do For You?

FPGA, CPLD & HDL Design

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLDs) are programmed or configured using a Hardware Description Language (HDL). The languages we normally use are VHDL and Verilog. In addition to FPGAs and CPLDs we have significant expertise in designing full-custom and semi-custom integrated circuits (ICs) or microchips, known as Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) design. We can take your digital and mixed signal design from layout to fabrication.

FPGAs

We have worked directly with and have been listed as design partners for most of the major FPGA vendors. This places us in a unique position as we have a deep understanding of all the major FPGA vendors and are truly vendor agnostic.

ASIC Design

We are very experienced in verification and associated simulation tools. We have been responsible for formally verifying several important flight critical aerospace projects.

Space

We were responsible for designing the FPGA and associated circuitry using a radiation hardened (rad-hard) FPGA for a communications satellite. This was the first time that the company who had engaged us had used a rad-hard FPGA in one of their satellite developments.

Video

We have developed firmware for many video signal processing applications, filter design, noise reduction, motion detection, image manipulation, graphics processors, forward error correction, video compression to name but a few.

UV curing device for surgical adhesive

This medical device was based on a low cost, ultra-low power CPLD which not only provided safety interlocks and timing but also the power management.

Video Laryngoscope

This was an award-winning medical device that used an FPGA to process the video from a miniature camera. The same FPGA also provided the human interface and controlled the power management.

Penpal-HD

The award-winning Penpal-HD is the world’s smallest battery powered, studio quality test pattern generator with embedded audio test tones.

It achieved such a small form factor using a small FPGA and by coding a programmable test pattern engine.

VC-2 video compression core set

Designed in collaboration with BBC Research, our video compression core is the smallest video codec available and has been designed to fit into FPGA vendors’ cost-effective families.

Designed for demanding broadcast and studio applications, VC-2 HQ compression is ideal for low-latency, high-quality, low-cost, small form factor applications where light compression and multi-generation capabilities are required.

This makes VC-2 HQ very suited for security, medical, industrial control, machine vision, aerospace and defence industries.

The deterministic and reproduceable compression makes it well suited for safety or mission critical environments, and where systems need to be rigorously verified and qualified.

Thousands of our VC-2 cores are used in broadcast and studios, and can be found in equipment manufactured by companies such as SAM (Snell Advanced Media) and Grass Valley.

Low Delay – only a few lines of latency

Uniquely, in the low latency profile a compression factor of 8 times can be achieved with only a few lines of delay.

VC-2 HQ – Flexibility, any picture format

The VC-2 compression system and core set is not locked to a given picture format as it is wavelet based, which makes it very flexible. This means that VC-2 can compress pictures from a QCIF format right through to 8K, and also has customisable picture formatting to accommodate any new picture standards. Parameters such as frame rate, chroma subsampling and bit depth are flexible.

Scan formats can be progressive or interlaced.