SOFTWARE AND SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

Embedded Systems Engineering

The sensRAI team has extensive experience in the area of embedded system design; including FPGA based systems (from PCB design to final product), embedded OS (including Linux and popular RTOS), and design experience in a range of microprocessors and microcontrollers from 8-bit to 64-bit.

Specific details of the team’s capabilities are as follows:

FPGA

  • Complete FPGA PCB design and testing from schematic capture to prototype evaluation including on board RAM, FLASH, USB and Ethernet IO as required.
  • FPGA programming in languages and frameworks including Verilog, System Verilog, VHDL and LabVIEW.
  • FPGA algorithmic development such as DSP and ML algorithms using Matlab, Octave, Python and LabVIEW depending on customer requirements.
  • Experience with silicon suppliers such as Xilinx/AMD, Altera/Intel and their toolchains such as Vivado, Vitis and Quartus.

Embedded Linux and RTOS

  • Team experience in porting Linux to embedded platforms including FPGA hard and soft-core processors. Flavours of Linux used include standard Linux distribution (adjusted to embedded constraints as required), PetaLinux (specific to Xilinx MPSoCs such as Zynq and Microblaze softcore), uClinux (for devices with no MMU support).
  • RTOS experience includes FreeRTOS (Amazon), Zephyr RTOS (Linux-like for microcontrollers) and VxWorks.

Processors and Microcontroller

sensRAI are happy to engage with customers wishing to create products that use a range of different microprocessors and microcontrollers from 8-bit devices through to 64-bit. The team has previous experience in a range of devices a sample of which are presented below:

  • Low complexity 8-bit devices from companies such as Microchip and Silicon Labs with very low complexity in terms of ROM and RAM but with a wealth of peripheral and IO support such as I2C, SPI, UART, GPIO, timers, comparators, ADCs and DACs. Projects developed using their proprietary development frameworks such as MPLAB from Microchip and Simplicity Studio from Silicon Labs.
  • Medium complexity microcontroller families from Micrchip, Silicon Labs, STM and others. Devices featuring modest amounts of ROM and RAM allowing an RTOS implementation such as Free-RTOS or Zephyr that exploit the range of peripherals they support.
  • More complex microcontrollers with either on-chip RF (SoCs) or as part of an SoM. The team has experience of example devices such as STM32 with LoRa, Nordic semiconductors nRF52xx with on-chip Bluetooth or the nRF91xx family which includes cellular IoT, and the Espressif ESP32 family with both WiFi and LoRa capabilities.
  • Microprocessor designs including Xilinx Zynq and ultrascale MPSoCs with a range of dual and quad-core ARM processors capable of supporting a full Linux distribution. Extensive experience of the Raspberry Pi with its various multicore ARM processors and embedded Linux OS.
  • Experience of designing for the RISC-V processor using the Espressif ESP32-C6 SOC with WiFi and Bluetooth 5 (LE).