ANSYS HFSS Simulation

RF Interconnect Design - Aerospace

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to design a novel semi-rigid RF interconnect PCB to improve energy transfer, passband flatness and overall efficiency for a small form-factor product operating up to 30GHz.

Ansys HFSS was used to perform simulation of the current product, identify issues, and simulate performance of the proposed solution.

Three PCBs were re-designed as part of the effort.

System Architecture, PCB Design and Firmware for Vehicle Communications - Defense

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to architect a system consisting of several interchangeable modules to provide various communications and I/O to a central vehicle system.

Module types included technologies such as PoE, USB-PD, SPE and features like hot-swap control, surge stoppers and SELV power.

E3 Designers undertook all aspects of the design from concept, through requirements and architecture, and all the way to a finished PCBA, fully tested, and with a demo application running diagnostics and telemetry to a host application on Windows.

Extensive post-layout power integrity analysis (DC drop) was performed on the designs, given the high-power density design

Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA

Product Refresh - Xilinx Spartan 6 to Xilinx Artix 7 - Automotive

E3 Designers’ team worked with the client to identify obsolete components, suitable replacements, and then undertook a full product refresh to accommodate the component changes.

The system power tree, clock tree and core functionality were all impacted by component obsolescence, and the team worked to find the most suitable replacements and identify performance risks for the client.

 

Custom Carrier PCB Design

DDR3 Net Selection - Hyperlynx

Thermal Image - Design verification

Carrier Board for Fast Steering Mirror Module - Aerospace

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to design a custom carrier board to interface with existing electronics and 3rd party modules for a novel low Earth orbit (LEO) small form factor satellite.

A platform microcontroller was at the center of the design, along with power path control, CAN communications and local telemetry and diagnostics.

E3 Designers undertook all aspects of the design from concept, through requirements and architecture, and all the way to a finished PCBA, fully tested, and with a test firmware application to prove basic board level functionality.

Custom SoC Evaluation Platform - Aerospace

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to design a customized evaluation platform for a complex SoC for a satellite command and control platform.

In addition to the SoC additional technologies included on the design were DDR3, eMMC, flash memory, the client’s necessary external watchdog and protection circuitry, dual FMC mezzanine sites (LPC and HPC), programmable clock generators and several other communications links to interface with other pieces of the system.

E3 Designers undertook all aspects of the design from requirements and architecture, and all the way to a set of 5 finished PCBAs, fully tested and delivered to the customer.

Extensive pre-layout and post-layout signal integrity analysis was performed on the high-speed serial lanes for the FMC mezzanine sites, DDR3 interconnect and other high-speed interfaces to ensure excellent signal integrity.

Custom Handheld Timer - Commercial

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to design an add-on PCB for a commercial wireless timer module to allow for integration into a larger product eco-system via USB connection to a host computer.

E3 Designers undertook all aspects of the design from concept, through requirements and architecture, and all the way to a finished PCBA, fully tested, and with a firmware application to prove basic board level functionality and integration with the client’s API.

 

Product Refresh - Intel BitBus onto Xilinx Artix 7 - Semiconductor

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to re-design (3) PCBAs, each with several variants, for semi-conductor equipment with harsh EMI/EMC/ESD specifications, as well as ultra-high reliability requirements.

Many types of electronics and electrical circuit design expertise were required to complete the design work - ranging from high-speed digital, to precision analog, and power electronics.

Mixing legacy technologies (8088 era microcontrollers) with modern ones (Artix 7 FPGA) can be challenging, but the team was up to the challenge.

E3 Designers played a significant role on the program - design analysis and schematic capture, PCB layout management and review, design verification testing, technical project leadership and seeing the product through to launch and cut-in on the production line. In addition to design issues, E3 Designers helped with software quality (SQA) issue resolution, FPGA/software integration, technical task tracking (GitHub Kanban), and broad technical team coordination.

EMMC Net selection - Hyperlynx

Signal Integrity Analysis and Optimization - Aerospace

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to simulate existing eMMC design interconnect, determine root cause of performance issues, and propose changes to board termination and driver settings.

Extensive analysis in Hyperlynx was performed to baseline the design, and various ‘what-if’ analyses were performed to inform the client and provide them with multiple ways to improve signal integrity, and ultimately, product functionality

Finished Product - mated boards

Ultra 96 Breakout Board - Commercial

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to implement a design for a breakout board for the Ultra 96 development board.

The client provided a basic schematic, and E3 Designers carried the design through layout, post-layout analysis, fabrication, and basic testing.

Mechanical fit-check was critical on this design, given the existing board constraints and tight clearances.

 

RF ADC Signal Path - Net Extraction

PCB Layout Optimization: RF ADC - Aerospace

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to re-design and re-layout an analog front-end signal chain for an RF ADC application.

The client was having performance issues and worked with E3 Designers in order to try to improve channel performance.

The PCB return current scheme was re-designed and all RF interconnect was re-designed in order to try to improve performance. Design tweaks suggested and implemented included plane voids, NFP removal, anti-pad size changes and physical separation

With the assistance of HFSS extraction and simulation the team predicted improvements of ~4dB to both insertion and return loss, and crosstalk reduction of nearly ~65dB to adjacent channels

Bench Testing a full power path

Custom Vision System - Commercial

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to assist in the development of a custom vision system for a commercial client.

In this project E3 Designers was involved working on the PCB and electrical system design of the product.

E3 Designers was responsible for Spartan 7 FPGA design, DDR3 memory implementation, battery charger and power path circuitry, thermistor circuit design, an audio amplifier design and overseeing PCB layout and hardware design verification testing.

Extensive pre-layout and post-layout signal integrity analysis was performed DDR3 interconnect and other high-speed interfaces to ensure excellent signal integrity.

Production cable drawing - solidworks

Custom Heating Control System - Scientific Instrumentation

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to assist in the development of a custom heating controller system for a precision scientific instrument retro fit.

In this project E3 Designers was involved as a working on the electrical heating sub-system and control box, as well as for preparing a risk/hazard assessment and documentation package (user manual included) to aid in EMI/EMC and safety review.

In addition to the electrical wiring diagram, and component selection, E3 Designers also created production cable drawings in support of the project.

 

Industrial IOT Control Board

Custom IoT Controller - Industrial

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to assist in the development of a custom controller for an industrial application.

A platform microcontroller was at the center of the design, along with power path control, CAN communications, a text-to-speak module for audible alerts and a local user interface (LCD display, and user entry push buttons) for in-field configuration and paramaterization

E3 Designers undertook all aspects of the design from concept, through requirements and architecture, and all the way to a finished PCBA, fully tested, and with a completed application ready for the customer to deploy into their new installations.

Initial block diagram - vision system

Custom Electronics System - Human Vision

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to assist in the concept and design of a custom processing board and camera interface board for a novel vision system intended for people with impaired vision.

A Xilinx Zynq 7 series was the key processing element of the proposed system, along with a customized carrier board and camera interface board pair (one per eye) comprising the complete system.

E3 Designers undertook all aspects of the hardware design carrying the proposed design from a working breadboard, through requirements and architecture, and all the way to a fully designed set of PCBAs ready for procurement.

Low Power Control and Sensor Node System - Defense R&D

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to assist in the concept and design of a custom control board and sensor node board for a novel system.

An NXP i.MX7D was the core processing component of the control board, and an NXP RT1064 microcontroller was the core processing component of the sensor node board. In addition, DDR3, eMMC, copper and fiber Ethernet

E3 Designers undertook all aspects of the hardware design carrying the proposed design from a working breadboard, through requirements and architecture, and all the way to a fully designed set of PCBAs ready for procurement and testing. The boards were successfully used by the client in field trials and testing.

In addition to the hardware design, E3 Designers played a key role in providing a functioning Linux environment for the i.MX7D based control board, and worked closely with the firmware engineering team to create a set of drivers and test utilities available via uBoot.

 

Service Pack System - Industrial Automation

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to assist in the concept and design of a complete custom enclosure used in the diagnosis, testing and deployment of industrial equipment.

An ARM Cortex M class processor was used as the main processing element, and a significant amount of power electronics R&D engineering went into designing a boost converter for charging a large super-cap power bank, solenoid control, coulomb counter implementation and a localized OLED display

E3 Designers undertook all aspects of the hardware design carrying the proposed design from a working breadboard, through requirements and architecture, test firmware development, mechanical enclosure design and providing a ‘rev 1’ design that the customer was able to carry forward through their development process, ultimately fielding the unit.

Safety Conscious Lab Control System: High Power Heater Loads - Semicondcutor

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to assist in the concept and initial design of a custom control and monitoring system to control high power (10’s of kW) loads for software quality assurance (SQA), and long-term reliability (LTR) testing. The need for the design was born from a lab related safety incident which uncovered many safety issues with the legacy test system.

The team at E3 Designers captured the design intent in Altium Designer, SolidWorks Electrical, and provided a full 3D model of the enclosure, including the cabinet, mounting hardware and connectors.

A safety rated (IEC 61508) COTS control module oversaw the system, and a safety chain was designed to ensure power to the loads was cut under any fault condition, with redundant control and monitor paths.

Signal Eye - PCIe Gen 4.0

PCB Stackup Design and Signal Integrity Analysis - Aerospace

E3 Designers’ team worked closely with a client to design a PCB stack up for a high-density interconnect (HDI) Aerospace design intended for a next generation payload system.

With the assistance of HFSS extraction, Ansys SIwave, and Mentor Graphics HyperLynx the team optimized physical structures, performed pre-layout worst-case channel analysis, and simulated channel operating margin (COM) for DDR4, PCIe Gen 4.0 and 40GBASE networking.