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Design services
The work around the cores. Sometimes what a programme needs is not a licence but an engineer who has closed this particular problem before — a datapath that will not reach its rate, a link that drops out at temperature, a CDC audit before a tape-out.
What we take on
Five kinds of engagement
- Datapath and interconnect architecture Bandwidth and latency budgets across a whole design before anything is written: port widths, clock domains, buffer depths, arbitration policy, and where the rate will actually be lost. Delivered as a document with the arithmetic in it, not a block diagram.
- Host interface and driver work PCI Express integration, DMA descriptor design, and the driver on the other side of it — Linux, DPDK or Windows. Usually the fastest way to recover bandwidth from a design that trains a link and then underuses it.
- Timing closure and CDC audit A design that fails intermittently is usually a crossing or a constraint, not luck. We audit crossings and resets against a formal model, produce the constraints, and close the timing. This is the engagement we are asked for most often before a tape-out.
- Board bring-up Converter links, transceivers and memory interfaces on new hardware, including the parts that only fail on the third board or at the corner of the temperature range.
- Design rescue An inherited design, no author available, a deadline. We start with measurement rather than opinion and tell you in the first week whether it is repairable and what it will take — including when the answer is that it is not.
How it works
| First conversation | Technical, free, with the engineer who would do the work |
|---|---|
| Scoping | Fixed-price study for anything we cannot scope from a call |
| Contracting | Fixed price per milestone, or time and materials |
| IP ownership | Work product is yours; our existing cores stay licensed |
| Reporting | Weekly, with measurements rather than percentages |
We decline work we are not equipped to do well, and we say so
at the first conversation rather than at integration. A wrong-fit engagement
costs us more in support and reputation than it earns in fees.
Signal processing instead?
Algorithm-to-RTL work, modem and FEC implementation and radio front-end design are our sister company's.
AlfaRF design servicesDescribe the problem, not the solution.
What is measured, what was expected, and what has already been tried. That is enough for a useful first answer.