Demanding embedded software, electronics and user interface development

Demanding Embedded Systems Development
Certain applications, especially in safety critical environments, have very challenging requirements which require particularly demanding embedded systems to meet them. These individual requirements in themselves can be tough to meet but this is typically compounded by the need to meet a combination of these. Some examples Tactiq have worked with are:

• Extremely short real-time deadlines (down to 2μs)
• Very high processing performance
• Unconventional and often space-limited form factors for electronics
• Demanding power constraints including mixed sources (vehicle and battery) and low consumption
• Cost effective solutions for leading edge challenges
• Solutions to cover a large range of products with versatile and efficient designs.
• Tight project time frames
• Safety critical applications including ISO 61508

Tactiq specialise in the design and development of demanding embedded systems with a long track record of taking these projects on and delivering world class solutions. Our thorough system modelling approach to designing the software and electronics, coupled to our extensive skill and experience means that clients can be confident in our solutions meeting the most challenging requirements.

Market Leading Products
The pressure to meet competitive performance requirements while keeping product cost and development time down often requires a platform approach to minimise the total development work and maximise the value of this. Tactiq's integrated approach to system design ensures the platform has the optimum price/performance, is easily extensible and configurable and lowers the risk.

Our approach has also been proven for ground breaking technical solutions where we split projects into phases to first perform the system modelling, then produce concept demonstrators and take this through detailed design and validation into series production for our clients. Phased projects can be analysed at key milestones to minimise risk and ensure all business objectives are met.

Systems for Safety Critical Environments
In the design of safety related systems it is critically important that the safety aspects of the system are considered from the requirement stage through initial concepts, architecture, detailed design, testing into manufacturing and support. Tactiq use a safety lifecycle model based on ISO 61508 to ensure safety risks are identified early in a project, addressed in the design and development using robust development processes and checked and validated in the validation phase.

Example technical challenges and solutions
Gamma ray event processing must take place within 2μs, but processors that could perform the calculations quickly enough were expensive and required substantial support electronics. Tactiq used a pipelined approach with low cost FPGA based hardware accelerators for key operations allowing low cost fixed point DSPs to give high performance. A software approach that implemented speed critical operations in highly optimised code leveraging the hardware accelerators enabled complex operations to be built out of simple high performance building blocks. The result was a world beating system that gave high performance in a low cost, reliable and easily extensible system.

An automotive safety related system required the implementation and time critical application of complex algorithms with total assurance of performance. Tactiq developed the algorithms as a library supported on a target environment and a software test infrastructure to automatically run over 1000 test scenarios to ensure the a robust total product solution.

For more information or to discuss how we may be able to support you, please contact us.

We support the Healthcare, Automotive, Industrial and Defence markets.

System Engineering Skills

Demanding real-time embedded applications

Critical application environments including Healthcare, Automotive, Industrial and Defence.

Imaging systems

Active Sound and vibration control

Mixed signal systems

Ground breaking innovations including extensive modelling and simulation

Nuclear Medicine acquisition system and user interface

Safety Critical Automotive Systems

Industrial vibration control system

Active Noise Cancellation Systems