Bright Star Engineering specializes in providing engineering design services to the hi-tech community.

We work with you on your project from product concept through the delivery of working prototypes. Projects have been completed for small startups, Fortune 500 companies as well as for the U.S. Government.

With our commitment to quality work and customer satisfaction, let us be a positive force for accomplishing your next project in a timely manner.

VME Card for Wafer-Processing System Sensor and Actuator Control

Development of a DSP/FPGA based VME card for controlling all sensors and actuators for next generation wafer-processing system. This task included the development of 5,000 lines of VHDL/AHDL code for the 50,000 gate FPGA and board-level test bench. Implemented software for board level test and integration with customer's existing application software.
 
 

Reconfigurable PCI and SBus Interface Cards

Developed reconfigurable SBus and PCI bus interface cards for Sun Microsystems Inc. These boards allow rapid prototyping of custom co-processors, "soft" peripherals and/or I/O logic with little or no physical hardware development. The SBX+ consists of re-configurable logic in the form of FPGAs (initially from ALTERA and/or XILINX), shared SRAM, a bus interface ASIC or FPGA, a user-attachable daughtercard and miscellaneous glue and clocking logic. The FPGA logic is contained on 1-4 stacking mezzanine boards allowing one to mix-and-match FPGA technology from a variety of vendors and part families. The SBX+ daughtercard expansion interface allows the end-user to attach a daughtercard with the desired I/O connectors and/or user hardware (if any).
 
 

Fiber Optic Strain Sensing Instrument

In April 1995 BSE was contracted to develop a board to do the signal acquisition and processing for a novel fiber optic based strain sensing system. This project involved the design of a very low noise photodiode transimpedance amplifier front-end along with high-performance analog filters, A/D, D/A and DSP electronics. As part of this contract BSE also developed all the signal processing software used by the 56002 DSP and delivered 10 pre-production prototypes.
 
 

Quad Redundant Fault Tolerant VME System

Developed two VME board designs as part of developing the proof-of-concept prototype for a quad fault tolerant VME system funded by a research grant to BSE by the National Science Foundation. The first VME board is a generic processor board capable of supporting 68040, Intel 486 and Power PC 603 processors via a plug-in daughtercard. The other VME card consists of the redundancy management hardware for a single channel of BSE's quad clock synchronous fault tolerant system.
   

Embedded Speech Synthesizer

BSE was retained to develop a high-quality speech synthesis module which utilized very little power and fit into less than three square inches of real-estate within a hand-held palmtop computer. We utilized the latest in low-power (3.3 volt) logic and high throughput signal processing to meet the rigorous requirements for this application. The design/board contains over 60 components including FLASH ROM, SRAM, a 16-bit microprocessor, 80 MHz DSP, D-to-A converter, amplifier and two switching power supplies yet utilized less than 2 milli-amps of current when in idle mode. BSE also ported the needed speech synthesis software to the module which is now in production.