Ascend Geo Case Study
THE CLIENT
Ascend Geo provides industry-leading cable-free acquisition systems for the oil exploration industry.
THE CHALLENGE
Ascend Geo's goal was to provide a simple-to-use product for the end user in the field, bringing together a complex combination of ruggedized hardware, embedded software, and field deployed management and data storage servers. Engineering this product requires expertise at many levels. Ascend Geo's team has a deep understanding of the requirements for deployment of field systems. They coupled this with a solid software engineering team and partnered it with strong leadership. Cardinal Peak was asked to partner with this team to provide its expertise in hardware and firmware as they brought their next generation system to market. The system needed to be extremely stable in very harsh real world situations while adding features to make a richer solution in the field. These goals had to be achieved while maintaining a low cost and low power system.
THE SOLUTION
Cardinal Peak brought immediate value to the effort by attacking some of the most difficult problems that the hardware and firmware were facing. Instead of simply debugging the problems, we analyzed the existing firmware and hardware systems as a whole to identify performance-inhibiting factors while architecting new features that fit within the tight constraints of the embedded system. Cardinal Peak's substantial involvement included:
- Signal processing to identify edge detection logic problems that resulted in race conditions.
- Hardware design modifications to eliminate timing jitter.
- Hardware design to minimize the effects of environmental noise for the receiver.
- Redesigning the firmware and PLD to provide more robust error handling.
- Improving timing accuracy by replacing interrupt driven systems with a hardware counter-capture architecture.
- Bettering input sensitivity by improving the FM quadrature detector and local oscillator phase-locked loop designs.
RESULTS
Cardinal Peak's work on the project allowed Ascend Geo to focus their efforts on other areas of the project knowing that Cardinal Peak would deliver reliable solutions on time. The development effort produced an end product that is:
- More stable,
- More reliable,
- Has higher accuracy, and
- Better fault tolerance.
Geoff Nightingale, Ascend Geo's VP of Engineering, commented: "We were able to leverage Cardinal Peak's talents immediately. They came in to a project that was having some difficulties and were able to make a very positive impact in a remarkably short period of time."
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Engineering Expertise
Experts in embedded software, system software, hardware design, digital video, IP networking, system architecture, signal processing.
"We were able to leverage Cardinal Peak's talents immediately. They came in to a project that was having some difficulties and were able to make a very positive impact in a remarkably short period of time."
Geoff Nightingale, VP of Engineering, Ascend Geo
