LEARN ABOUT SOME OF OUR RECENT PROJECTS

At Innovative Computer Technology, we work together to meet each challenge that comes our way. No matter how complex or involved each new engineering project is, our versatile team has the experience and expertise to know exactly what is required to achieve success. Check out some of our projects.

Data Aggregator

This project was for a customer that produced air quality detectors that are used in nuclear power plants. The detectors are designed to look for various types of radiation that may have leaked out into the air. The detectors basically function as spectrometers.

Our job was to design and build a device that could interface to two USB detectors and retrieve the stored data. The data would then be processed and organized into files suitable for transmission to central servers over ethernet or WiFi networks. Additional requirements were to embed GPS data into the files and to power the entire instrument via PoE (power over ethernet).

ICT designed the hardware, embedded software and created a mechanical housing for the device. A PCB was layed out and several units were built, tested and delivered on time and within the budget.

3D TV

ICT was contracted to develop a sophisticated video rendering board to be used in 3D video TV applications. The unique feature of this system is that special glasses for viewing are not required. The customer had a proprietary video scheme that produced the 3D effect. The use cases for this product are video gaming, digital signage and movies.

Central to this design was a large Altera Arria V FPGA. The FPGA provided multi-gigabit I/O video, DDR3 controllers, and many other peripheral interfaces such as SPI, I2C and 1-wire.

The handling of very high-speed digital communication links is something ICT has been doing for many years. Careful attention must be paid to the physical routing of each differential pair along with the number of allowable vias per trace to achieve the desired performance.

A 64-bit DDR3 frame buffer was also part of this design. The Arria V FPGA has two internal hard-wired DDR controllers, these devices were used to optimize the transfer rates to/from the DDR memory. Due to the physical locations of the DDR controllers in the FPGA the physical memory had to be broken up into 2 32-bit sections. The memory was positioned adjacent to the top and bottom of the FPGA in order to cleanly interface to the internal DDR controller circuits of the FPGA. This proved to be a fairly challenging problem. However, ICT was able to come-up with the solution and successfully implement the design.

The board also featured two onboard processors. One was a Kinetis K82F secure uP, used to handle digital content protection, and the other being a Cypress PSOC ARM Cortex-M3 that was tasked with FPGA loading, onboard peripheral management and USB communication.

This project was one of the more challenging designs that we have had to do. The video input requirements included Display port 1.2, HDMI 2.0, Displayport over USB-C and VbyOne. ICT succesfully met all these requirements and implemented the design with a 14-layer PCB.

Ultrasonic Pulser

The oil well drilling industry presents a very unique set of challenges for a designer. The electronics encounters very high temperatures and vibrations as the down-hole tool is operated. The electronics basically are mounted in hollowed out pockets in the side of the cylindrical drill shaft right behind the drill head.

ICT's customer was developing a new down-hole tool that required the design of an ultrasonic ranging board. The ultrasonic pulses sent out from the drill reflect off the wall of the drilled hole. This process happen continuously as the drill spins. By measuring the time of flight for the returned pulses information on the position of the drill can be obtained. This information is used by other subsystems in the tool.

The fundamental design approach for the pulser section was analog. Upon receiving a fire command from an on-board processor a boost transformer was employed to generate a high voltage (300V) pulse. This pulse was applied to a 250KHz piezoelectric transducer. As a result of being excited with the 300V pulse the piezo launches an acoustic wave into the drilling fluid that is used in oil well drilling. This wave will reflect off the wall of the drill hole and be returned. The returned wave now uses the same piezo as a receiver. The echo is much smaller in magnitude than the original acoustic wave, therefore its detection is critical. The echo is first applied to a differential low-pass filter to remove any high frequency artifacts.

Next, we employed a time dependent gain circuit to linearly amplify the signal as time elapses. This is due to the fact that the echo degrades rapidly as it transits thru the drilling fluid. The farther away the tool is from the edge of the hole the longer time it takes for the signal to reach the piezo.

Since we are only interested in the envelope of the echo, a full-wave rectifier/envelope detector circuit is employed as a final step in the signal processing chain before the ADC. Once digitized an on-board DSP runs an algorithm to calculate the range from a particular sample point.

This project had a true mix of analog design, digital design, and difficult environmental conditions. In the early stages of this project ICT employed SPICE simulations to test the analog design techniques being used to generate the high voltage pulse and the receiver circuitry. The use of SPICE proved to be invaluable to the success of this project in that its use dramatically shortened the design/debug cycle by uncovering issues during the simulation.

Manufacturing Test Systems

One of ICT's core competencies is the design and deployment of manufacturing test systems for our customers. A few years ago a customer asked us to develop a functional test fixture for a laser heater board that was used in a very sensitive interferometer based product. This fixture required the development of an intelligent test fixture control board along with PC-based Windows control software. The test fixture control board had to simulate all the signals presented to the laser heater board during normal operation with a real laser. A significant portion of the test was devoted to testing if the DUT's hardware feedback control loop converged as it was meant to do with real lasers.

Each fixture was designed to hold two laser heater boards. We built four trays, and architected the system such that all four trays could be connected together and be operated from one PC. The PC-based software printed out very complete and detailed test reports at the end of each testing cycle. ICT also delivered extensive documentation at the end of this project.

Once the customer saw the results of the functional tester, ICT was contracted by the same customer to design and build an extended test or burn-in test fixture for the entire fully assembled laser product. This was a large project. The system requirements were to be able to support 24 laser heads at a time. Each laser head occupied a roll-out shelf on a 19-inch vertical rack. Each rack could handle 4 laser heads, so there were six 6-foot tall 19-inch racks that comprised the system.

In order to test each laser head each shelf contained an optical detector, optics, and a custom designed electronics box. The custom electronics featured an embedded processor, power supplies, temperature and humidity sensors, op-amp signal buffers and an ADC. ICT architected this entire system, designed, fabricated the electronics, and coded all the embedded software.

Communication from each test shelf to the PC was accomplished over an ethernet link. The Windows based PC control software was also developed by ICT using the VisualStudio NET Integrated Development Environment. The software allowed the user to independently control each laser head under test and setup the various test parameters for each DUT.

At the completion of each testing cycle an Access Database output file was created. Various test reports could then be printed out or saved by the user. If errors were detected during the test they are documented in the test results file. The type of error is identifed along with a timestamp of when the error occurred.

This system has been running very successfully for several years. ICT provides long term commitment to our work and as such we periodically field tech support questions from the customer concerning this system.

Data Acquisition

ICT routinely works in the area broadly known as data acquisition. An interesting application we became involved in was for a client that provided equipment to the mining industry. The customer needed a specialized ADC board to handle information produced in real-time by a piezo-electric transducer. The piezo was part of a novel piece of equipment that is used to characterize the grind size of particles coming from a copper mining operation.

For this design the data was sampled at 5MSPS, 16bit resolution. The 5MSPS rate gave an effective bandwidth of ~2.5MHz. The preamp section consisted of two independent stages, one suitable for high-gain applications (100x) and the other for low-gain (10x). Each preamp contained a high bandwidth forward AC signal path as well as a low bandwidth DC restoration feedback path. We used a DC restoration loop to maintain the output of the preamp stage at 0V in order to provide adequate operating headroom for both positive and negative polarity signals. A full SPICE simulation was done for the preamp/baseline restoring circuit.

Following the preamp section we had a buffer stage and a single-ended to differential amplifier used to drive the ADC. The ADC in this case was a high performance delta-sigma device with a default oversampling ratio of 8.

This board was layed out using Allego. ICT then fabricated, assembled and tested 10 units. This product has been successfully deployed by the customer in its grind size mining product. The end customer has provided very positive feedback.

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