Planet 1's experience covers a broad range of embedded system designs ranging from 4-bit through to multi-core 64-bit microcontrollers and microprocessors with memory sizes from tiny (hundreds of bytes) to megabytes. As well as memory limitations, real time multi-tasking system requirements, reliability, power, security and system cost are key to a successful stand-alone or Internet connected (Internet of Things) design. Planet 1 can assist in your product design in many ways from providing essential off the shelf software infrastructure modules, advice, electronic and firmware system design, module design and implementation to full product implementation.
Tony is currently Group Technical Director for MotionLED Technology Ltd who have developed thin and robust LED screens for transport vehicles, see http://www.motionledtechnology.com/
Customers include: http://www.motionledtechnology.com - LED screen design and development (each LED tile runs on Zepto Elements in a multi-CPU system). https://www.callbox.cc - Designed and developed all the hardware and firmware (with parts of Zepto Elements used in a TI DSP RTOS system) and co-designed the device-web protocols for this secure IoT device. https://www.pbdesign.co.uk - Designed and implemented firmware for their 3-phase charge controller. http://www.switchee.co - Code analysis and debug advice to do with a CPU anomaly. LiteLogic Ltd - The picture (top right) is of LiteLogic's DiscLite display - a spinning LED display which uses 512 LEDs to create an image of over 1/4 million pixels. Tony, while being the Technical Director, architected the system and designed the hardware, firmware and FPGA code for this product and was involved in the mechanical and motor design.
Previous employment: HP Bristol 1998-2006 - Tony was responsible for the HP Ultrium LTO Tape Drive firmware infrastructure, this included developing device drivers, cyclic handler, trace logging, firmware update, deep debugging, RAM usage optimisation, speed optimised functions, V850 µITRON RTOS protection wrappers, etc. and most notably Tony designed and implemented a new RTOS and ported all the firmware from the NEC V850 microcontroller to an ARM core embedded within an ASIC. This new RTOS had a new API, was designed specifically for the LTO Tape Drive, was extremely fast, had a small footprint and incorporated all the knowledge gained from the protectiing wrappers around the old V850 RTOS. The new RTOS was initially targeted for the V850 to replace the existing V850 µITRON assembly language RTOS, the LTO-3 Tape Drive running the new RTOS passed all the product and regression tests. It was then ported to an ARM microcontroller development board running, via an FPGA interface board (also design and implemented by Tony) to the V850 emulator socket, on the Tape Drive. The remaining firmware was then ported to the ARM toolchain to run on this board and passed all the non-V850 product and regression tests. Within in a couple of days of the new LTO-4 ASIC arriving the firmware was running and had passed all the required tests.
FPGA Article (published 2012): RedShark News. FPGAs: the processing miracle in our video tech |