New life for ageing electronic products

Many Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) struggle to continue shipping ageing or obsolete electronic products.

Electronic products designed five to 10 years ago are still relevant in the marketplace.

Often these venerable old products have gained particular acceptance amongst a select group of customers.

In many cases, these old products fulfill a need in a unique manner.

Examples include: designs that are grandfathered into an application due to regulatory considerations; designs having unique form fit and function; designs running special software; designs subject to contractual support and service requirements; and designs in which a new contract stipulates delivery of older gear as part of a larger system offering.

Any one or all of these reasons can lead an OEM to continue the production of electronic equipment well into its end of useful component life.

As electronic product designs age, component parts become increasingly difficult to obtain.

Component buyers may experience difficulty in obtaining key parts within the design and part prices may increase.

A point comes when component parts begin moving towards end-of-life at an alarming rate.

Quick fixes are no longer sufficient.

Sometimes an OEM will procure a lifetime supply of problem parts - but this supply can be quickly wiped out should unforeseen demand develop.

Lack of component parts puts an end to production.

There is an alternative: profitable, old products can be redesigned.

Either by preserving the original form fit and function, or by adding new features.

Product redesign is a cost-effective means by which to extend the life of a marketable product.

Orchid Technologies Engineering and Consulting has recently completed the redesign of a precision LCR instrument.

Accurate to 0.05 per cent of full scale, the original 1988 instrument design was well executed.

However vintage 1980s state-of-the-art electronic components were going end-of-life rapidly.

The first step was to study the existing design.

Through a process of study and review Orchid identified a redesign approach.

A detailed development plan was then generated proposing significant technical improvements and cost reductions.

Chief among these improvements and reductions were: reduce circuit board count from two to one board; simplify external connection methods; simplify complex shielding methods; remove requirement for SRAM battery backup with FRAM; replace floppy drive with USB stick; replace obsolete TMS320C31 DSP with new TMS320C6713 and port firmware accordingly; replace obsolete analogue devices 32bit DDS circuitry with new 48bit DDS circuitry; replace obsolete Burr Brown (TI) analogue-to-digital converters with new SAR converters; reduce most digital logic to a single Altera Cyclone FPGA; and replace through hole components with SMT parts.

The new instrument is form, fit, and function compatible with the old, while achieving improved accuracy to 0.01 per cent with a 3x increase in measurement speed.

The original LCR instrument circuit board set required separate analogue and digital circuit boards to perform its functions.

These circuit boards were shielded with a complex jumble of sheet metal, spacers and screws.

Additionally, expensive coax cables were installed to make the DUT connection.

Orchid's new design is elegantly simple.

All circuitry (both analogue and digital) is now on a single board, Altera FPGA devices integrate digital functions and system shielding has been simplified.

The result is a lower cost, easier to build, easier to service assembly that has another five to seven years product life.

An obsolete 33MHz TMS320C31 DSP performed high-speed sine-wave correlation functions.

Twenty years ago, these DSP processors used a proprietary 32bit method to represent floating point numbers.

Today, modern DSP processors, such as the 200MHz TMS320C6713, can represent floating point number with 64bit precision using industry standard IEEE floating point methods.

Updating the DSP processor required porting the old DSP source code to the new floating point DSP processor.

The benefit was greatly increased mathematical precision together with increased DSP execution speed.

These two factors alone served to improve instrument precision from 0.05 per cent to 0.01 per cent accuracy.

Integration of digital circuitry onto a single Altera FPGA saves space and reduces overall digital system signal noise.

Modern FPGA allows replacement of an entire circuit board with a single high-density component.

Redesign is a perfect solution to nagging production problems.

Orchid Technologies have redesigned electronics for industrial, aviation, medical, automotive, consumer and telecommunications markets.

Orchid's ability to focus multidisciplinary resources in analogue design, high-speed digital design, programmable logic design, power, software and microcomputer design results in successful redesign work for all clients.

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