Many projects require a team of design engineers to provides many different services to customer. Since we are a company that can adapt quickly using both permanent and contract personnel we can accept many challenges that other companies are either not willing or are unable to attempt to solve.

We have working partnerships with other design engineers that have specialist skills required for any given project. Having a scalable R&D team that has collaborated on other projects is the past is essential for projects that require multiple disciplines.

MECHANICAL AND INDUSTRIAL DESIGN
Working with our partners, Layer16 can also provide industrial and mechanical design services.

Our industrial design partner provides each of their clients with a highly individualized approach to every new project. People are the key: your team, the end user, technology partners, the experience. The outcome is always appropriate design with an added spark that connects with your customers and brings increased profitability. Services include: Strategic design direction, creative concepts & mock-ups, design, manufacturing liaison, new directions for the future.

Our mechanical design partner helps companies bring exceptional products to market. Their team of experts has designed products for the consumer, medical, and industrial markets. They have world-class clients, and many successful products that speak convincingly of their commitment to excellence.

ELECTROMAGNETIC COMPATIBILLIY (EMC) TESTING
Test Houses are great at testing your products - and telling you whether you passed or failed. In our experience they are not good at helping you find and fix the majority of issues you will need to address to get your product to pass.

We will work with you, explaining, engineer to engineer, in language you can understand what you need to do and why you need to do it. We can sign off your designs and identify most non-compliance issues before anything is built. We have seen many products that have not been checked properly for EMC issues before being committed to PCB. These products have often had compliance issues designed in that could have been easily prevented.

The nature of many EMC problems means that these boards can then not be provided with a definitive fix sufficient to know that all issues have been identified and that the next issue of the product will pass. These products will often have several issues, most of which could have easily been avoided by having your product assessed before producing anything.

As engineers we have all experienced products with multiple design problems - a single issue is normally easy to correct - as soon as you have multiple, interacting problems the time and cost to fix them increases exponentially. By ensuring that all the right bases are checked in your designs the likelihood of a first time pass or, in the event of a failure, being able to identify and prove a solution on your prototype hardware increases dramatically, saving cost.

SYSTEM DESIGN
Taking the initial architecture information provided by the specification this is refined to develop a detailed system implementation.

The partitioning of logic implementation between discrete and FPGA based components is also considered during the system design phase. Where appropriate gate vs pin utilisation for an FPGA may indicate that certain functions should remain a discrete logic components. A typical example of this is bus buffering.

Depending on the particular sensitivities of a project, specific design parameters will be evaluated or re-evaluated at this point. Some typical examples are unit cost, power consumption, physical size, environmental tolerance, assembly technology and key mechanical design issues. In many cases these parameters will be discussed with the customer and other design partners (e.g. industrial design) to ensure that all design requirements have been achieved.

During system design, the system test method will be developed according to the project requirements.

System Design and Product Architecture Capability:
- Data, Voice, Voice & data integration
- Storage systems, backplanes
- Performance enhancements and Cost Reductions
- Supply Chain Management

Test & Verification:
- Product Testing, Protocol testing
- Network management test, Diagnostic testing
- Test plan/procedure development
- Component evaluation & qualification Regulatory compliance support

Project management:
- Experienced Project managers
- Effective Project Management Procedures

Layer16 has the ability to design custom hardware solutions for its customers. This includes not only standard board design using many of today's latest processors and peripherals, but also the ability to design custom Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC's), Filed Programmable Gate Array's (FPGA's), analog and RF circuitry and more.

Experience with Major Programmable Logic Vendor's Products Including:
- Altera Cyclone, Cyclone II, Stratix, MAX7000, MAX II
- Xilinx Virtex 5, Virtex 4, Virtex II Pro, Virtex II, Spartan 3, Spartan 3E, XC9000
- Lattice XP Family

Experience with all aspects of design:
- System design and partitioning
- Expertise implementing complex algorithms for data manipulation, queue selection, data ordering
- RTL Coding (Verilog, VHDL, AHDL, etc)
- Synthesis, Place and Route, Timing Analysis
- Verification TestBench Development
- High speed IO including LVDS, PCI, MGT and SERDES
- FPGA to ASIC conversion

Hardware Design:
- Board-level design, Microprocessor design
- ASIC design, FPGA design, CPLD design
- I/O interface design
- Bus design & functional models Signal Integrity Analysis

Experience with major Microprocessor Families:
- MIPS
- ARM
- PowerPC
- i960
- StrongArm
- Analog Devices BlackFin
- Shark
- PICs

Interface Design Experience:
- Ethernet 10/100, 1GB, 10GB
- OC3, OC12, OC48, OC192
- ISDN BRI, ISDN PRI, E1/T1, DS3/T3/E3
- Fibre Channel 1Gb and 2Gb
- xDSL

Software Aspects:
- Real-time embedded software design & operating systems BSP's and drivers
- System initialization & boot
- POST and BIST Configuration Tools
- MS-Windows development

Real Time Operating Systems:
- Embedded Linux, Real-Time Linux
- VxWorks, pSOS
- Nucleus, Precise MQX, VRTX, OS
- ThreadX

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