Electronics Design & Development

Briefly on Services

The Electronics Design & Development group offers custom-design electronics for the experimental groups of the institute. Designs over the past years cover a wide spectrum of both analog and digital electronics. Fast switching High voltage/current designs (up to tens of kV/A) driving a variety of capacitive and inductive loads have also been carried out, with excellent results. Much work has been done in microprocessor-based, and quite recently in FPGA-based, systems. When possible designs are performed in a modular manner so that for commonly encountered sub-functions, tested designs are in place, which can quite often be adapted to meet altering needs. This in-house design and development of custom electronic equipment is advantageous, since subsequent modification of designs to meet changing or new requirements can be performed more easily.

The picture to the right shows the internals of a fast HV Switch - 30kV, less then 100ns rising/falling edges, upto 100kHz repetition rate - to drive capacitive loads, such as parallel plates/electrodes. With Over Voltage/Current protection features. The black box on the top left is a commercial HV switch, where as the circuitry surrounding the switch is in-lab designed and built construction to shape the elecromagneitc field to prevent damage to the device and to the user. When in use the device will be hermetically closed, i.e. the front cover will be installed. The metal enclosure serves as shielding, reducing the electromagnetic noise in the laboratory to an acceptable level.

The 3D image to the left depicts an FPGA/µC based general purpose board, developed as the main PCB in a rate metering device. There are various types of memory devices on the board, which can be used for various applications. Several interfaces, for instance to keypads, LCD character display, rotary encoder push-buttons and the like, are also on-board.

Chances are that we can design a device specially developed for your measurement at hand that better suits your needs than a general purpose off-the-shelf instrument. So discuss your requirements with us and we will see what we can do. Before we start with the design though, we do first evaluate, in internal team discussions, the feasibility of the requirements and the chances of success. 

We work on a best effort basis. But being a small group with limited resources, we are most often quite busy. As a result, you may have to wait long for your project to get completed. It would be appreciated, and very helpful for us, and of course for you, if you discuss your project requirements with us already in its early stages. As a service department, we work essentially based on a sort of "First-In, First-Served" waiting-list. Measured over the long term, we make an effort to give as fair a proportion of our time to all experimental groups. Due to the nature of our work - designing and optimizing electronics devices - we can not commit ourselves to binding deadlines or delivery dates with any precision. You are of course welcome to occasionally inquire about the progress of your project.