FPGA design is one of  the core activities for Skytechnology.
We have been continuously enhancing our skills and keeping pace with the evolution of programmable logic technologies.
Designs of any complexity can be managed and successfully completed.
Our engineers undergoes a mandatory course on FPGA design, HDL coding and Project Management.
Tools and design flows can be easily adopted in order to better fit with customers design methodologies.

Services we can provide are:

• Turnkey FPGA development
• IP Development
• FPGA Fault Tolerance approach
• DO254 Verification
  

Turnkey FPGA Development
 
Skytechnology can take care of a FPGA project starting from any level of its design life cycle.
Moreover, Skytechnology  can engage with the customer for:

• Feasability analysis
• Requirements capture
• Architecture
• Verification methodology
• Design Implementation and validation
• Hardware platform verification
  

IP Development
Skytechnology can develop custom sub-function according to  the customer’s requirements, growing up flexibility and interfacing to have a reusable IP.
Skytechnology can integrate third party IP to obtain a system core design.
Our experience in industrial standard interfaces allows to increase application fields of developed IP or design core.

DO 254 verification

The design of complex hardware for safety critical areas generated the need of more structured and controlled implementation and verification methodologies: more complex is the hardware and more it risks to be vulnerable to adverse effects generated by bugs; moreover, a more complex hardware is more difficult to be debugged.
To counteract this perceived escalation of risk it has become necessary to ensure that the potential for hardware design errors is addressed in a more consistent and verifiable manner during both the design and certification processes.

RTCA/EUROCAE proffers a certification signed as DO-254, applicable to hardware design and FPGA development flow.
Our services aid customers to configure a FPGA design life cycle, compliant to DO-254 certification requirements.

Many activities can be addressed:

• Assurance analysis
      To define assurance goals
      To select assurance strategy
  
  

• Plan process definition
      To define FPGA design life cycle
      To select standards
      To define development and verification methods
  
  

• Development activities support
  
  

• Verification activities support

FPGA fault tolerance

Reconfigurable devices are more and more used in critical applications (as aerospace, automotive or biomedical systems), increasing the need for fault-tolerance capabilities. To address these requirements, hardware redundancy can be implemented in order to mask possible faults.

FPGAs reconfiguration structure also provides fault-tolerance capabilities by introducing the possibility to reconfigure some blocks, in order to bypass operational faults. Therefore, the use of dynamic reconfigurable FPGA allows to implement high reliable systems with a limited cost.

Our approach is focused on the implementation of low-redundancy self-checking circuits able to auto-detect the presence of a fault inside the circuit, both for control flow (Finite State Machine and microcontrollers) and data path oriented structures.
For control flow structures the use of signature analysis allows to detect faults using a very limited hardware redundancy, while the use of redundant signed digit number representation allows to implement very high speed arithmetic units with inherent fault detection capabilities.
Moreover, we developed reconfiguration (after a fault detection) methods based on HW/SW co-design, to reconfigure the FPGA after a fault detection.

We can also developed error detection and correction codes for storage system and architectures based on Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) for applications that don't allow the use of the reconfiguration-after-fault method (e.g. when no down-time for repair is allowed).

Application fields

Skytechnology FPGA engineers skills come form experiences in many different application areas.

• Industrial : communication protocols, controller and sequencer, standard interfaces (VME, PCI).
• Telecommunication: SDH, Ethernet.
• Broadcasting: DVT-B
• DSP: video imaging, modulation, compression