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Boxing clever
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18/04/2008
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It’s two months since Welsh digital set top box designer TVonics Solutions was bought by its manufacturing partner, Contact Holdings, and just over four years since its inception TVonics has created a range of digital TV receivers and recorders, both under its own name and for a number of other well known brands.
TVonics has a reputation for ease of use and energy efficiency and the company has built a loyal following from a public increasingly willing to consider carbon footprint and ‘buy British’.
Unusually, Tvonics’ manufacturing and design are currently done on the same site. Hardware manager Mike Jones says of being local: “There are many benefits to designing our products and being based within the same market place. We understand the nature of the market well and can react quickly to new opportunities.”
Jones points out that the need for designers to work closely with production is as strong as ever: “There is a tremendous amount of communication between the designers and the production engineers here, especially regarding test strategy. In terms of testing, control and measuring your production output, I believe there are considerable benefits for us from being able to manufacture in the UK. If there are issues that arise, they can be dealt with quickly and effectively.”
Tighter integration has meant that the electrical design is becoming more and more a system integration exercise, concentrating its efforts on providing added value, such as ease-of-use and low power consumption. Whilst IC integration has made certain design and production tasks simpler, the feature sets of newer generation products is such that the test time as a percentage of the development cycle has increased. Yet system test procedures have evolved too, as TVonics bears witness to.
TVonics development test bench comprises all the equipment you would expect – traditional oscilloscopes, logic analysers etc. One recent addition, however, has been XJTAG’s development system, which is being used by the design facility to speed up debug and test of ball grid array (bga) populated printed circuits boards (pcb).
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Author
Vanessa Knivett
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