Custom instrumentation

Almost everything in our catalogue started as a one-off. The lock-in amplifier existed because a THz setup needed one; the digitiser existed because a gamma-ray experiment needed four channels of pulse-height acquisition that no affordable commercial box provided. Custom work is not a sideline for us. It is where the products come from.

What we take on

Custom FPGA boards and firmware, analog front ends and low-noise amplification, detector readout chains, data acquisition systems, instrument control software, on-board and host-side analysis, and complete turnkey measurement systems where we deliver a working chain rather than a board.

Because the acquisition platform is firmware-reconfigurable, a great deal of what sounds like custom hardware is not. Channel mixes of ADC, TDC and AWG functions are assigned per application; multi-board synchronisation over a shared clock and trigger backplane scales the channel count while keeping the system phase-coherent.

How an engagement runs

We start with a specification and, where it matters, a noise budget, agreeing what has to be measured and to what precision before anything is designed. The build follows from that. Getting the specification honest at the start is what keeps the later stages short.

Start a conversation

Send us the measurement you need to make, the signal levels involved, and the constraints you are working under. If we are the wrong people for it we will say so.