Custom Memory Card Solution for Rail Hardware

Our regular customer – a major player in the rail industry – operates with a specific wayside logic controller that has to be supported and updated. They applied for our railway development services to eliminate issues with MagicRam memory modules to collect any critical info.

Overly long response time of the modules did not allow the whole system to provide sufficient performance, and operate at high loads. As a result, the data could not be delivered in time.

While investigating the issue, we identified that due to the hardware implementation of the wayside controller, it violates the PCMCIA protocol-level timing constraints and therefore, existing MagicRAM modules may not operate properly.

To solve this problem, we needed to exchange the cards, but the variety of PCMCIA Memory Cards to replace the existing module was significantly narrowed on the market because it was an old standard, and the primary manufacturers were ceasing production. So, we needed to develop and provide documentation for full cycle manufacturing of proprietary PCMCIA Memory cards that would provide improved performance and proper operation of the PCMCIA module on both hardware and protocol levels.

When developing a substitute hardware solution, we delivered the following:

• Schematics design of PCMCIA Memory Card
• PCB layout creation of PCMCIA Memory Card
• Components library compilation
• CPLD programming
• Capturing and documenting additional diagrams: Implementing testbench to determine PCMCIA bus timings
•  Preparing documentation for timing diagrams and parameters description
  
• Schematics design of testing fixtures required for manufacturing automation
  
• PCB design of testing fixture
  
• Full documentation for device mass production 
  

• Requirements Definition
• Hardware Design
• Prototyping
• Firmware development
• Firmware validation
• Testing
• Final Delivery
• Support