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The Hardware Design Challenge

With todays tight budgets, demanding schedules, and increasingly complex systems you need an experienced design team to understand your requirements, get on it, and have it done right. Right? At Verity Consulting, thats been Job-One since 1998. If your system requirements include a custom board, or you wish to push the performance limits of technology beyond whats available off-the-shelf, let us design a cost-effective solution thats ideal for your application.
Whether its gigabit I/O, PCI, FirewireTM, digital video, a companion board to an existing system or a stand-alone buffer or accelerator, weve been there and provided world class designs for startups to mid-size companies to the biggest names in the business. Heres a sample of some of our recent projects:

Aircraft Fiber Video Test Set

This single-board solution provides the Airbus integration lab as well as their worldwide video equipment vendors with a validation and debug tool to reduce integration schedules for the complex video system aboard the A400M military cargo plane. The board generates test patterns and converts between three video standards for displaying fiber-based video streams on a standard DVI flat panel display as well as capturing video data for analysis. It supports nine bi-directional fiber video channels: for 2.125 GHz ASVI (Avionics Serial Video Interface), 270 MHz SMPTE-297M, and 1.62 GHz CDS (Cockpit Display System, ARINC-661). The Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGA provides the video processing as well as GHz SERDES for direct drive to the fiber optic modules. A Freescale PowerQUICC II CPU provides upload/download, and control functions to the Windows GUI user interface via Ethernet. DDR DRAM memories provide video frame buffering.

Unmanned Aircraft Flight Control Processor

The real time PowerPC system incorporated 30 IEEE1394/FirewireTM ports operating at 400 Mbps for aircraft control surface actuation and high-speed data links between the triple-redundant board set. A 2M gate Actel FPGA provided 19 UARTs for monitoring various aircraft health and safety data tolerant of high altitude single-event upsets. The high-reliability, flight-critical system was designed for the
Photo courtesy Forbes Inc.

Northrop Grumman X-47B unmanned combat jet aircraft prototype and was reported in the May 23, 2005 issue of Forbes magazine.

CPU Board for Airliner Video Surveillance System

The CPU board used an IBM Power PC network processor for running imbedded Linux for a passenger cabin video surveillance system receiving digital video from 16 cameras placed throughout the passenger cabin for the Boeing 777 and other aircraft. The system provided video via Ethernet to flight deck crew for monitoring passenger activity without opening the flight-deck door. On-board resources included PCI bus, 100base-T Ethernet, SDRAM, SRAM, Flash memories and FPGA real-time control.

PCI-Bus Video Buffer-Controller

This board stored over 1600 frames of SXGA image data in 256MB (expandable to 1GB) of onboard PC-100 SDRAM for high-speed drive of miniature FLC (Ferro-electric Liquid Crystal) flat panel 1280x1024 pixel displays. This system enabled high-speed display frame updates as well as programmable image rotation lists for a wide range of applications including optical computing and holographic data processing. Video data rates were 60 MHz on a 64-bit bus for a peak bandwidth of 480 MB/s.

PCI-Bus Single-Board Optical Correlator

This groundbreaking system incorporated a proprietary optical correlator chip, which integrated two FLC (Ferro-electric Liquid Crystal) image displays with a CMOS imager for capturing the resultant correlation. Image data was digitized to 10bits at 33 MHz on four parallel imager channels. This design was presented at SPIE AeroSense 2000 Conference (April 2000, Orlando, FL).

Liquid Crystal Display-Remote Head Board

Utilizing high-speed data multiplexing and clock recovery, this board enabled placement of the display two meters from the buffer system while maintaining 64 bit, 60 MHz data streams. The head board was connected by a small flexible cable by the use of LVDS technology multiplexing the data at high speed to reduce the connector pin-count and cable size dramatically. Data rates in the cable are 500 MHz.

Custom FPGA Firmware Solutions

Heres an example of custom firmware targeting the clients existing hardware. VHDL coded FPGA-based real-time SXGA Flat Panel Display formatter:

This FPGA design converted 1280x1024 raster video to bit-plane format for driving proprietary miniature flat panel displays. Bit-plane format enabled exploiting FLC characteristics for true 24-bit color imaging. It required processing of high-speed (62 MHz) streaming data to video frame buffers. Floorplanning, relative location constraints and reentrant routing techniques were used to yield highest possible FPGA performance. Universal PCMCIA Flash memory card: FPGA firmware translated commands and handshaking in real time to utilize latest generation Flash memories in legacy host equipment.

Specialized Single Board Solutions

Evaluation board for an ASIC design house to demonstrate operation of their 100-MHz ContentAddressable Memory controller chip. Precision Timing epoch generator for a satellite payload instrument test system.

CCD Camera Circuits

Several high speed digital CCD camera designs utilizing imagers ranging from custom 512 x 512 pixel, 1000-frame per second to commercial 1024x1024 pixel CCD at 60 frames per second to scientific 2048x 2048 pixel CCD at 4 frames-per-second. Features included user selectable frame rates, pixel binning, electronic shutter speed, selectable video gain, external synchronization. Heres a list of just some of the world-class companies we have served: Boeing Aerospace, Seattle Spectra-Physics, Inc., Eugene, OR Cray Research, Colorado Springs Aeroflex UTMC, Colorado Springs Displaytech, Inc., Longmont, CO Goodrich Aerospace, Minneapolis Smiths Aerospace, Grand Rapids, MI Smart Modular, Wilmington, MA Sigtek, Inc., Columbia, MD DRS, Colorado Springs

Let us expand your reach with design resources to create costeffective and timely solutions for that next hardware design. Give us a call to discuss what we can do for you. Regards,

Barry Wolt President/ Principal Engineer