Comprehensive documentation lets PCB designers create MityDSP-ready carrier boards
Syracuse NY (November 16, 2009) Critical Link, an electronic product development company, today announced the release of the MityDSP Carrier Board Design Guide. The Guide is an instruction manual for PCB designers embedding Critical Link’s MityDSP in their products. The MityDSP is a family of highly-configurable, very small form-factor DSP-plus-FPGA modules optimized for custom data collection and processing, and used in a range of scientific instrumentation, manufacturing instrumentation, test & measurement, communications, and defense applications.
“The advantage of the MityDSP has long been that it has saved our customers the time and costs associated with building a custom CPU engine,” says Critical Link VP Tom Catalino. “And, traditionally, our customers have wanted Critical Link’s engineers to take care of the last-mile customizations required to make the MityDSP their own. Some customers, however, have been looking for a solution that lets them more easily take over that customization process. That solution is the MityDSP Carrier Board Design Guide.”
The Guide provides complete and detailed documentation of the MityDSP, written to enable PCB designers to create carrier boards that take best advantage of the CPU engine. The Guide includes “insider” technical information on the module itself, its connectors, and electrical and mechanical requirements; recommendations for board layouts, capacitance and other areas; and reference schematics and layouts. The Guide is available free of charge to those embedding the MityDSP in their application.
Critical Link client Mezmeriz has built a tiny projector designed to be embedded into mobile devices. This projector is capable of providing close-up, bright, high-quality pictures and video for hours per charge. The company was interested in embedding the MityDSP in their projection evaluation kits targeted at partners and research applications but wanted its own engineers to take care of any customization required.
“There’s a lot of wisdom embedded in the Guide that our engineers can take advantage of,” said Brad Treat, founder and CEO. “When it came to a CPU engine for Mezmeriz’ products, it didn’t make sense for us to build one from scratch. That’s why we turned to the MityDSP. But given the complexities of our products, we would have had to go through a long technical hand-off in order to bring the Critical Link engineers up to speed on them so that they could take care of any application-specific integration. So the MityDSP plus the Guide is the perfect solution for us.”
For Critical Link, the Guide is part of their MityDSP-related offering continuum. On one end of the continuum, Critical Link clients can use the Guide to help them embed the MityDSP on their own. On the other end, Critical Link engineers can take on the task of carrier board design. “There’s also a middle ground,” said Tom Catalino, “In which we can take on design of discrete parts of the board. We want our clients to have full flexibility here with respect to balancing their time to market and cost requirements, and the bench-strength and availability of their technical staff.”
About Critical Link
Critical Link is an electronic product development company providing products and services to a broad range of industries. Critical Link is located in Syracuse, NY.
About Mezmeriz
Ithaca, New York based Mezmeriz is a designer and manufacturer of Micro-electromechanical System (MEMS) mirrors and mirror modules based on a novel carbon fiber materials platform developed and patented at Cornell University by the company’s founder and CTO, Shahyaan Desai.