Design Note #6
Electronics product development in the twenty first century is a fast paced game where product obsolescence haunts the best designers. Boards which were state of the art only a few years ago are now antiques in the world of 33, 66, 100, and 133 MHz Computing System Busses.
Many factors affect the life of today’s electronic products. These factors include piece part availability, the expense of through hole technology, feature creep, pressure for last time buy, and product size. OTEC addresses all these factors bringing engineering talent to your redesign requirement. OTEC will study your existing product and provide you with a well considered re-engineered solution. Often, a re-engineered solution is smaller, consumes less power, costs less to manufacture, and is more reliable than the original product.
Orchid Technologies Engineering and Consulting Inc. has performed numerous technology conversions of older ISA, VL-Bus, STD, and VME bus designs to newer bus architectures. The through-hole, ISA board shown below provides a proprietary IEEE-488 interface to OTEC’s medical device client. This board is part of the communications backbone between the client’s instrumentation and the user’s computer equipment. Board size, aging ISA Technology, and component obsolescence were all factors forcing OTEC’s client to re-engineer this board. OTEC performed the redesign effort preserving 94% of the customer’s existing DSP software while fully upgrading all hardware. The result: five to eight years additional product life.
Even Gene Rodenberry’s Starship Enterprise has been redesigned. Perhaps your product is ready for an upgrade as well. OTEC is ready to provide you with electronics design for the 21st century too.
"Star Date Supplemental Scotty: "The old board designs, she can't take it, Captain! What are we going to do?" Kirk: "Redesign those boards, Mr. Scott. Call OTEC now." Scotty: "Aye, aye Captain." "
