Cobham Technical Services has extensive expertise in creating high performance analogue electronics. We identify the most cost-effective trade-off between analogue and digital circuit functions and use digital techniques to improve the performance of analogue circuitry.
Increasingly sophisticated digital electronics has provided enormous benefits in product consistency and functionality. However these systems still have to interact with an electronics world which is inherently analogue in nature. High quality analogue electronics provide the essential bridge between analogue and digital domains.
In spite of the capabilities offered by digital electronics there are still products that are best implemented as analogue functions from both cost and performance perspectives. Then there are the products where the strengths of the analogue and digital domains can be brought into partnership to achieve performance not otherwise achievable e.g. advanced software controlled calibration and linearization schemes.
Even the printed circuit board used to interconnect components is an analogue component in its own right. Unless this is correctly designed, the performance of the circuitry it contains can be severely compromised. We use 'Zuken Cadstar' as our primary design tool. 'Protel' is offered as an option.
Cobham Technical Services offer analogue design expertise in:
- Power supply design.
- Filter design.
- Signal conditioning.
- Sensor interfaces.
- Analogue to digital and digital to analogue conversion.
- General purpose and specialist amplifiers.
- Specialist signal processing functions.
- Signal switching.
- Signal isolation.
- High speed comparators.
- Waveform generation.
- High performance printed circuit board design.
Design example – high speed pulse ratioing instrumentation card:
This project demonstrates a wide range of Cobham Technical Services' analogue design skills. A high-speed instrumentation card was designed to capture 10 nS wide pairs of pulses with average amplitudes in the order of 15 mV at rates up to 10 MHz. The card then ratios and histograms the results over a defined time window using a high performance Digital Signal Processor (DSP).
This solution required low-noise wide-bandwidth amplifiers, signal conditioning filters, a peak detector that could detect a pulse with a 10 nS rise time over a 40 dB dynamic range, high speed analogue to digital conversion, low noise power conversion and distribution and DSP controlled calibration functions.