HARDWARE ENGINEERING

Electrical Hardware Development

At the beginning of any new project our electrical design team works very closely with the client and our software and mechanical engineering team to capture the full system requirements and critical specifications including:

  • Desired product capabilities
  • End user profiles
  • Usage cases and scenarios
  • Operating environment (Temperatures, Vibration, EMC etc)
  • Performance requirements
  • Unit target costs
  • BOM management
  • CEM selection and management
  • Required timescales and development program
  • USPs vs competitor products
  • Energy consumption and Battery life (where relevant)
  • Route through prototype, initial customer trials and production tooling
  • Anticipated production volume
  • Design life
  • Type Approvals Required
  • Program costs

A thorough understanding of the above ensures that we can meet the clients objectives and closely monitor and program manage the development. Even where the project requires cost reduction or performance enhancement of an existing product most of the above are still relevant. In recent years BOM management and CEM management have become much more problematic with chip shortages forcing significant redesigns. These redesigns often require change of primary processor and/or FPGA which can have a roll-on impact on the firmware and software.

sensRAI is very experienced in new product development of new complex electrical and electronic systems and the redesign of existing electrical and electronic systems to overcome silicon shortages or runaway cost increases.

After requirements capture we develop a complete program plan with specific timetables to meet the customer requirements. From there we move onto the following traditional electrical development path:

  • Schematic capture, check and validation
  • BOM components and total costs
  • PCB design (up to 24 layers)
  • Prototyping
  • Prototype testing and validation (with JTAG boundary-scan testing as standard)
  • Initial software integration testing
  • Physical, thermal and EMC performance testing in partnership with the mechanical design team
  • Prototype release and customer testing
  • End-user testing and feedback
  • Improvement and design tweaks
  • Type approval management
  • First production runs
  • Ongoing BOM and CEM management

The sensRAI team is highly experienced in the above process and we ensure that the customer is satisfied no matter what the product use case or the type of market is. We have developed key products and component sub-systems for the following markets:

  • ML/AI target data acquisition systems
  • Electronic Optical and IR targeting systems
  • Radar and LiDAR systems
  • Mission critical DC power systems
  • Hybrid renewable power systems
  • Remote monitoring and control systems
  • Carrier class 2G-5G radio systems
  • Secure broadband mobile communications systems