Experiences

Does this sound familiar to you ... ?

Your project is in its final hot phase and the product to be developed is actually working, but sometimes it just doesn’t. This last phase of the project seems to be endless, deadlines are approaching and cumulative technical issues are showing up. Most of the hired development service providers have already received part of their remuneration and operate with “muted motivation”.

This delays should be avoided, because during the last phase of a project, most time and financial resources can be used up. This phase shows how carefully the system architecture concept has been worked out and the implementation has been thought-out. Careful advance development is the basis for all well encapsulated implementations, so that the effort for debugging during the critical final phase of your project does not exceed your budget or time frame.

To avoid such situations, my extensive experience, obtained in international development projects from industry and science as contractor and client, enables me to create modular concepts for system architectures or implementations for embedded systems for you from the concept phase on. These are reusable, easily extendable and traceable.

Algorithms in FPGAs or SoCs

How a custom innovative algorithm, for which no comparable implementation exists, can be implemented with sufficient throughput in an FPGA or SoCs? To answer this question sustainably, sometimes not only a clever implementation idea is needed, but also a basic conceptual consideration and its simulation.

My long-time experience in the fields of Signal, Video, and Image Processing includes, besides the high-performance implementation of such innovations, also the conceptual development of the necessary digital circuit techniques. Here a good quality of an existing system architecture shows their advantage when the resulting implementation can be added to the overall system with little effort.

System architecture for embedded data processing with FPGAs and SoCs

In addition to implementation, I have also been involved in the system architecture of embedded systems since the beginning of my professional career. It turns out that the clever choice of a suitable modular distribution of the system functions and a stable system architecture can significantly reduce the time required for implementation. Among other things, this allows the development of critical implementations to be encapsulated and to handle better unforeseen system complications.

My developed system architectures, interfaces and bus systems, including the peripheral sensor and detector modules, are specialized in high-performance processing of two- or one-dimensional data. Typical application areas are digital video processing for computer vision systems with image processing rates above 150 frames per second and latencies of less than 1 ms or signal processing with digital SuperSampleRate filters (digital filters that process several samples per clock cycle).

Time measurement using digital circuits (TDC)

More and more applications benefit from the compactness, flexibility and performance of digital circuitry in or supported by FPGAs, FPGA SoCs or ACAPs. This is also true for applications that need to perform extremely precise time measurement of the timing of events. This is known as the conversion of a time measurement to a digital value (time-to-digital conversion, TDC). At this point, the term precise means a time measurement with a time resolution of less than 50 ps (FWHM) for a single measurement (single shot).

During my work for scientific institutions and companies in industry I encountered this sub-application very often and was surprised how well the same measuring principles of digital circuit technology for precise time measurement could be transferred to the different applications.

Applications where I could gain my intensive experience with TDC were e.g. the lidar- and sonar-based distance measurement with accuracies of less than 1 mm as industrial measurement devices, or the development of scientific measurement instruments, like a fully digital TDPAC spectrometer for the investigation of condensed matter properties, which is now used in the ISOLDE laboratory at CERN to contribute to metrological evaluation.

Please visit also the Good to know section of my Website. There I mention the most frequent reasons for problems during the development with programmable logic and offer hints to avoid them.