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Experience.

What value does experience offer? It’s very simple: past performance is the best predictor of future success.

Sapphire’s capabilities and services display our broad range of knowledge. Our experience demonstrates that we know how to apply our knowledge to real world problems.

Some of our recent successes:

  • KnS Logic, Columbus Ohio: Implemented a USB3 webcam for a consumer application. This fast turn prototype run was size, cost and schedule driven. Start of project, design, layout and fabrication to completed, fully working prototypes in seven weeks.
  • Silver Engineering, Melbourne, FL: Delivered two Actel FPGA designs for a space temperature sensor calibration test fixture. Designs done in VHDL with a full testbench developed for verifiying the design.
  • Advatech Pacific, San Bernardino, CA: Quick-turn micro PCI-Express daughter card utilizing Freescale IMX6 quad-core processor, on-board DDR3 DRAM, flash, dual Ethernet and USB interfaces. Went from design concept, through design, and to full layout in 8 weeks.
  • Advatech Pacific, San Bernardino, CA: Designed a man-wearable version of the Tactical Cross Domain Solution (TACDS – see below) to allow battery operation and provide all the functionality of a Cross Domain Solution (CDS) in a much reduced size and power.
  • Ohio State University, Columbus OH: Implemented a customer-supplied DSP algorithm in VHDL targeting Xilinx FPGA implementation. A full simulation and correlation Matlab model was done and then the verified design was implemented in a Virtex-6 LX240T.
  • Advatech Pacific, San Bernardino, CA: Lead board designer for the Tactical Cross Domain Solution (TACDS) which provides automated cross domain solution (CDS) to execute user-programmable rule sets. This design implements a triple processor system with dual Ethernet, USB, serial and adds the capability of Wi-Fi all in a small, low-power, hardened form factor that meets Mil STD 1275 electrical specifications. In aggressive program we went from idea to fully functional prototypes in four months.
  • Air Force Research Labs Anti-Tamper/Software Protection Initiative (AT-SPI), Dayton, OH: Lead design engineer providing hardware design and FPGA design support for the AT-SPI initiative from its inception.
  • Naval Research Labs, Washington DC: Implemented a stand-alone hardened SRAM test unit for radiation testing and verification. Multiple Xilinx Picoblaze processors drive different test patters, verify results and display them on an LCD display. This is implemented in a Xilinx Spartan 3A FPGA.
  • Old Bird Inc., Cornell, NY: Designed a high quality audio preamp for automatic identification of bird calls of migrating birds. Added lighting protection to the system and an hourly calibration tone implemented in a PIC microcontroller.
  • Naval Research Labs, Washington DC: Implemented a hardened SRAM test fixture for radiation testing and verification. This is implemented in a Xilinx Spartan 3 1000 FPGA.
  • University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY: Designed a custom video processing board. This board takes four HDMI video inputs, implements custom real- time video processing on the video streams and then outputs the result over four HDMI outputs. This board implements all the processing in a Virtex 4 FPGA with four independent banks of SDRAM. The FPGA design was written in VHDL and debugged utilizing a full simulation testbench. The board has a USB interface for setup and control and a SD card interface for data storage.
  • Silver Engineering, Melbourne, FL: IMAGE Program. Provided space-based reconfigurable computing design analysis of the possibilities for using partial reconfiguration in Xilinx FPGAs for space applications.