When taking on a project, the engineers at VadaTech implement our products and design to create customized systems, often reducing overall system complexity and creating something more efficient and effective for our customers to use. A good example of this was when we recently contracted with an East Coast engineering company to design the processing platform for an RF detection system for submarine periscopes.

Our team was able to reduce system size and cost by repackaging the data acquisition sub-system away from VPX and into a dual FMC carrier in AMC form factor.  Placing dual Analog Devices AD9234 ADCs on an FMC, then housing two such FMC on a Virtex-7 based carrier, provided a compact and cost-effective solution while meeting the client’s performance requirements.

VadaTech specializes in custom solutions, and we design them with your input every step of the way. The products used in this application included AMC525 and FMC228. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you with your specific applications.

Our client this time was a major defense, aerospace, and IT company that approached VadaTech with an interest in our VT820 hardened ATC chassis to house a custom ATCA blade. A benefit of our in-house design and manufacturing is our ability to take on custom jobs for our customers, but our engineers suggested that a solution for this client could come from our standard MicroTCA lines. We introduced them to our MTCA offerings and ended up with a contract for the entire system—not bad for a first impression. 

The customer implemented AMC modules into their air-cooled MTCA.0 chassis, and then VadaTech collaborated with them to create several MTCA.3 ruggedized chassis to meet their harsh environmental requirements. The completed project featured a number of our products, including the VT873 chassis and several AMC carriers: 525, 527, 529, 629, and 635. 

If you need rugged solutions for your specific applications, contact us to learn more about VadaTech’s ruggedized product lines.

Part of our mission is to fully involve the customer in the design and manufacturing process. With the flexibility of in-house manufacturing, we specialize in creating custom solutions for unique applications. We were contacted for a custom project by a U.S. Department of Energy research lab, originally to learn more about our MicroTCA options after senior staff finally admitted VME was too long in the tooth to stay with. After this initial connection, we collaborated with them to create a beam monitoring system that would monitor for system malfunctions and shut down their accelerator in the event of an issue.

For this contract, the customer specified that they required a low latency connection between AMC modules, initially suggesting a crossbar fabric switch. However, the client also needed to go many-to-one, but the latency of an Ethernet switch was out of the question for this project. Our engineers’ solution was to build a new fabric module for our UTC002-V7, putting an FPGA in MCH slot 2 taking ports 8-11 from each AMC module. Faced with some very specific stipulations, VadaTech’s engineering team designed a custom system that addressed the customer’s specific needs, and kept our client involved with the process every step of the way.

If your applications have specific requirements, we’re happy to help: contact us to begin a collaboration.

Our collaboration with a high energy physics research company is a case study for how VadaTech’s commitment to our customers is reflected in every stage of a project. Our client was missing a digitizer for a LINAC accelerator compatible with EPICS, resulting in a risk to fail their integration deadline and commissioning. The customer participated in a joint bid with multiple other companies, and a VadaTech partner secured that the digitizer would be allocated to VadaTech if we agreed on the budget, time, and functional requirements.

This presented us with a unique opportunity to build a reference in high energy physics by directly providing an end-user application, and to integrate and validate the DAQ Series onsite, including EPICS. In this case, our customer needed a full solution for product performance and compatibilities, as well as integration service and support. Our close relationship with the client allowed us to smoothly adapt the DAQ Series with feedback from the end user until the Site Acceptance Test at the customer’s facilities, and allowed them to get all the information they needed from our engineering team, during onsite training and integration, to be able to maintain their product in the long term.

With this project, it was that deep cooperation between key engineering teams and respect for deadlines that formed the base for a long-term partnership between our companies. Additionally, working closely with our teams in Taiwan and a local partner company helped see this project through to completion. With our partner pushing for MTCA.4 benefits and integration capabilities, internal development at VadaTech Taiwan proving solution feasibility, and strong support from headquarters management, the collaboration proved to be a success.

Beyond just this contract, the project formed the base of VadaTech’s DAQ Series with EPICS and also served as validation for the project to both Engineering and Sales. Meanwhile, our customer received their platform ahead of schedule and before all of the other parts of the joint tender were delivered, and they served as a very good reference for our partner who originally pushed for MTCA.4.

Partnerships are the key to our success and are always mutually beneficial: contact us to learn how to start ours today.

With our AS9100-accredited manufacturing facilities, VadaTech is committed to providing agile production facilities and accelerated deployment for our clients’ custom solutions. But having the best versions of current equipment isn’t enough to keep our edge, so we’ve invested in the latest technologies to ensure that our facilities have top-notch capabilities. 

Case in point is our 3D printer, a Stratasys Fortus 450mc, which manufactures custom components out of durable thermoplastic materials with unmatched accuracy, impressive turnaround time, and no waste. As the printers themselves become higher quality, manufacturers and industries are increasingly drawn to 3D printing because of its capability of producing very specialized components rapidly, at low cost, and without relying on economies of scale. 3D printers can also be used to create very complex designs that are extremely difficult or impossible to produce using traditional manufacturing methods. At VadaTech, our engineers have taken full advantage of 3D printing’s prototyping capabilities: for a recent project, they designed and printed an entire chassis subsystem. Fit testing the complex assembly before manufacturing parts enabled product deployment in revision A. 

Granted, 3D printing is not known for being speedy—the chassis alone took three days of continuous printing to finish—but having a complete product after days of printing is astounding next to the nearly four weeks it would have taken to create the same chassis using conventional methods. With a 3D-printed product, modifications were also made in just a few days, providing massive reductions in time-to-market. 

With its proven capabilities in mass customization and greatly accelerated deployment, we keep finding new ways to add 3D printing to our design and manufacturing processes. Is this level of innovation typical for our industry? Certainly not. But we’re technology leaders, and more than that, risk takers—and for us, the cutting edge is our every day. 

Contact us to learn more about how your applications can benefit from the customization allowed by 3D printing. 

One of VadaTech’s key partnerships is with Xilinx, the world’s leading provider of All Programmable FPGAs, SoCs, MPSoCs and 3d ICs. Xilinx FPGAs and SoCs are at the heart of many of our products, and our customers benefit from VadaTech deploying Xilinx silicon in a standards-based architecture, reducing their time to deployment. This partnership has allowed us to produce groundbreaking products like our new AMC595, the industry’s highest-performing AMC, based on the Xilinx UltraScale XCVU440. 

A Member of the Xilinx Alliance Program since 2012, VadaTech currently has 28 listings on the Xilinx website to assist customers looking for VadaTech embedded solutions featuring Xilinx components. With new products recently added and more to come in the next weeks and months, the Xilinx product directory is a valuable reference for our customers and others interested in high performance embedded solutions for a wide variety of applications. 

Be sure to contact us with any questions about our partnership with Xilinx, or about any of our products featuring Xilinx components. 

Every project VadaTech takes on is an opportunity to start a mutually beneficial partnership, as we saw when an engineering company approached us with a basic web request about our blade, FPGA, and FMC offerings for a base station RF routing system. With our robust offerings in SIGINT and signal translation & routing applications, we were able to connect them with the best solutions for their applications, which now feature the VadaTech VT951 rugged chassis, the AMC630, which was designed out of the company’s need for a dual-storage AMC, and the AMC726, AMC525, and FMC225. 

While the company had originally selected our ATCA architecture for an unrelated base station, our integrated MicroTCA systems left an impression—so much so that we welcomed both their project and integration teams at our headquarters in Henderson, Nevada for training. While this particular trip to Las Vegas involved longer hours on the factory floor than the casino floor, we were able to introduce our new partners to the latest developments underway at our in-house manufacturing center. 

Be sure to contact us if you want to learn more about how we pair our innovation with your vision.