Engineering Services

North Star Systems' engineering staff is experienced in Electrical Hardware Design, Software Design, and Systems Engineering. 

Printed Wiring Boards

We design custom printed wiring boards for your product.  We have experience with designs containing analog and/or digital circuits, gate arrays, microprocessors, digital signal processors, communications interfaces, video circuits, control circuits, power amplifiers, battery charging circuits, PCI-bus, PC/104, and more...  We use OrCad design layout tools and can produce very high-density printed wiring boards, with any IC package type including the new ball-grid array packages.  Boards can have up to 10 or more circuit layers if necessary.  We provide a complete turnkey solution, including schematic design, component placement, routing, PWB fabrication, assembly, and test.

More on Electronic Hardware.

Servo Controls

We design servo controllers for systems with hydraulic valves or electric motors, resolvers, optical encoders, etc.  Our capabilities include designing the electro-mechanical drive assemblies, and developing the software algorithms for your controls application.  Applications may include flow control, stabilization, camera and machine control.

System Engineering

Our staff has experience with electro-optical sensors such as TV, IR, and laser rangefinders.  Combined with video displays, servos, and controls, we have engineered a variety of stabilized weapons systems, electro-optical sighting systems for fire control, missile seekers, user-programmable flow controllers, fiber-optic video and data routing systems, high-speed serial digital data recording systems for integration into a PC, video tape recording controllers, and wireless communications links for controlling video tape recorders and editing equipment.

More Systems We've Designed.

Video Circuits and Video Processing Software

North Star's engineers have developed video digitizers, video multiplexers, video routing circuits for a fiber-optic distribution system, and many special video processing algorithms to process video in real-time on embedded microprocessors, digital signal processors, and PCs.  Applications include video tracking, motion detection and cueing, moving object segmentation, video graphics overlay (marks), and more...  video circuits

Software Development

North Star's programmers are experienced with several languages, assembly, C, and C++.   We have developed embedded software for target processors, as well as applications for the PC.  We use TI's Code Composer Studio, Metrowerks' CodeWarrior, and Borland's C/C++ development tools, which combined, cover almost all target devices on the market today.  If your product needs software control, video processing, complex software state machines, user-programmability, ballistics and fire-control algorithms, special filter algorithms, or wired or wireless communications interfaces, North Star can help you develop, test, and produce the software.

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Logic Design for Programmable Logic Devices

We can develop gate-level logic for just about any size PLD, CPLD, or FPGA.  North Star uses Altera's Quartus II development system which covers all devices in the Altera family of programmable logic, including the high-power Cyclone and Stratix devices.  We have integrated IP cores for bus interfaces, processors, and RAM controllers, and have developed extensive custom logic for many applications.

More FPGA Design.

Analog Circuits

North Star has many years of experience with analog circuit design, power regulation, battery charging circuits, op-amps, filters, control systems, A/D and D/A converters and signal conditioning, phase-lock loops (PLLs), video, power amplifiers, and more.

Bus Designs

Serial:  RS422, RS232, SPI, I2C, CAN-bus, Control-S, and CCNET, custom wired and wireless packet protocols, encoding, decoding, and error detection

Parallel:  PC AT-bus, PCI-bus, VME-bus

Other:  LVDS, and Low-Voltage Positive Emitter-Coupled Logic (PECL)

Concept Design and Development

Many of our customers come to North Star in the early stages of product definition.  We have worked with aerospace and defense prime contractors, private corporations, and commercial businesses to help them design many different types of new products.  Our capabilities include concept design and development, analyses to select or optimize key components in a system, writing system documentation, software development documents, interface specifications, communications protocols, environmental test plans and procedures, product test plans and procedures, and manufacturing process documentation.  We can also produce quality documentation for design reviews, software safety reviews, product specifications, operating and maintenance manuals, and more...