Case Histories: What You Can Expect from Us

To provide customers with higher performance and lower cost electronic subsystems, we push the state-of-the art in many disciplines - electronic design, optics, embedded processors, and manufacturing. To ensure that such advanced work interfaces cleanly and exactly to our customers' products, we establish collaborative teams for extensive face-to-face coordination with customer engineering and manufacturing personnel throughout research, development, prototyping, and production.

Here are five examples of recent achievements.

To reduce the likelihood of collateral damage to both surgical patients and equipment, we developed advanced embedded algorithms to control more precisely the generation of RF plasma at the tip of a surgical probe. The collaborative work enabled us to use advanced electronic design techniques to reduce the size and cost of the power subsystem, resulting in a cost savings of 75% to the OEM.

The need for more light for endoscopy and arthroscopy led us to develop an advanced laser and power supply combining red, green, and blue sources to produce 10 watts of white light - three times the output of a Xenon bulb - with far less heat. In a synergistic development, the combined laser and control subsystem can produce 64 million colors as well as white. The colored light enables surgeons to optimize procedures utilizing feedback from specific tissues. The cost of this subsystem is competitive with Xenon and LED subsystems.

To eliminate current leakage and radio emissions in an ultra sound surgical systems we developed a new transformer and control system for a switching power supply that can be used with a wide range of AC input. Our work enabled the OEM instrument to meet international medical standards for a formerly prohibited surgical procedure.

Ultrasonic transducers require very specific drive electronices. Every type of transducer has traditionally require a unique driver. Working collaboratively with an OEM, we developed a single, versatile ultrasound driver for the entire range of 20 to 60 KHz and virtually any transducer.

The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors challenges fabs to meet decreasing resource consumption goals. Thermoelectric chillers have the potential to reduce energy consumption by more than 50%, compared to Freon chillers, but existing 6 kW power supplies for such chillers are unreliable, expensive, and too big. For an SME OEM we developed a new power supply from the ground up, with precise feedback control for optimum energy consumption, a smaller footprint, and a lower cost.