Argon Design provides all the skills required to design and supply complex electronic products and equipment. We cover the complete range from bespoke one-off systems to high volume consumer electronics products. We work across the consumer electronics, telecommunications, broadcast and industrial markets.
Customers can buy point skills from us or we can offer a one-stop shop covering the whole design process.
For high volume designs, we can develop to prototype level, including testing and approvals and assist in putting the design into production in the UK or the Far East. For lower volume products and equipment we can offer a complete service supplying finished products or systems.
Virtual R&D team for entrepreneurs
Concepts
We can help frame the problem, propose solutions, investigate algorithms, brainstorm for ideas, find parts that could help or simply act as a sanity check reviewing work that has already been done. Our output would usually be in the form of a presentation.
Specifications
The next step for a project is usually to take the requirement and decompose it to create detailed design and test specifications. Often this is accompanied by creating a plan for the rest of the project.
Electronic design and printed circuit boards
We are experienced in detailed electronic circuit design. We cover all aspects of digital and analogue circuits. We also have individuals who can work with us for RF design. We do a mixture of in-house and subcontracted PCB layout and are familiar with the complex techniques and simulation methodologies required for routing modern high-speed signals.
Our in-house tools are OrCAD for schematic capture and Cadence Allegro for PCB layout, although we can work with whatever tools a customer wishes.
FPGA logic
Many low-to-medium volume designs use FPGAs either to implement part of a processing system or to act as the glue interfacing processors to high speed peripherals. We can produceRTL in Verilog or VHDL and optimise it to run at speed in an FPGA. Our standard tools are Synopsys Synplify for synthesis and Mentor ModelSim for simulation.
Embedded software
We write code in C and C++ for embedded processors, PCs, GPUs and many-core devices. We are experts in optimising code for parallel architectures.
Designs may run “on-the-metal” or be written for a standard OS such as Linux. We have also developed hardware and device drivers for Android.
Mechanical design
Most products need an enclosure. We can use off-the-shelf units or design custom mechanical parts working with a local machine shop. We have contacts with industrial designers and mechanical engineers for more sophisticated requirements.
RTL and Semiconductor IP
With several of our team coming from a chip background we are experienced in designing digital IP blocks for incorporating in an ASIC.
We have designed processors, video encoders and decoders, image processing blocks, and graphics engines as well as simpler peripheral and bus fabric blocks.
Image processing
We have deep expertise in multimedia and image processing. See our image processing page for more details.
Network processing and Intelligence
Manycore processing is particularly well suited to Network Processing, particularly for extracting Network Intelligence, performing Network Security and managing Wireless Infrastructure. We develop solutions specifically for network packet processing, are partners of Qosmos for their Network Intelligence/Deep Packet Insection technology and work with Advantech, Tilera and others to provide optimised solutions for a variety of applications - see our page on Manycore Applications.
Design verification
We can perform functional testing, environmental testing and regulatory approvals for safety and EMC.