Feb 2020. This web site is _VERY_ out of date, I haven't been looking for new work for a long time but will be updating it ASAP for the release of the FPGA Lock IP

Welcome to Nial Stewart Developments Ltd.

Nial Stewart Developments is a small Edinburgh based Engineering design company specializing in FPGA design and development, with a background in high speed digital design.

Our main experience is with Altera and Xilinx FPGAs, from system level architecture design and implementation to small module level design and test, with a background in high speed digital design. We also do hardware design to support FPGA implementations, this has been from single small board level solutions to undertaking complete custom product design in conjunction with a local Software Development company.

News

HSMC General Purpose Interface Board
Please see our Products page for some details of this board for expanding the functionality of many of Altera's evaluation kits.


PCI Express Board
We are currently developing a PCI Express interface card with a PLX bridge device coupled with a Cyclone III FPGA, this should provide the lowest cost solution for those requiring an FPGA board with a PCI Express interface. A single 256MB DDR2 DRAM is provided off the FPGA for data storage.
Expansion connectors will allow the board to be used with custom daughterboards for fast prototyping. Alternatively we will be able to use the board as a base for customer board development as we have done with our 'Easy PCI' board. The 'done and dusted' PCI Express interface should allow a fast/cheaper turnaround for customer boards.

Estimated timescales for the first boards being debugged are mid Q1 '08. Further details will be posted as they follow, any early enquiries are welcome.

On Screen Display Module
We are also developing a small FPGA based OSD controller, this generates text and user defineable characters on screen. We have this working with PAL cameras and will be adding NTSC functionality soon.
The design currently includes a Year/Month/Day/Hour/Min/Sec timer which operates stand alone. Interfaces to other embedded devices can easily be added to read and display custom outputs. The number of lines of text and characters per line is easily adjustable for custom solutions.
The design is very compact, a module based on one of the smallest Altera FPGAs will be able to generate OSD for two video streams. Moving to a slightly bigger device would allow multiple streams to be controlled much more cheaply than with the Maxim MAX4455.
This design is suitable for STV5730 replacement.

Older News....

Aug '07. Double news, we've moved again to premises with more space and facilities we'd like to welcome Alam Williams to NSD. As a graduate of four years experience Alan comes from Selex Systems where he was doing high level FPGA development for various new Radar Systems. He has come to NSD to further his low level electronics design knowledge and get more hands on board and product development design experience.

Please see our Contact Details page for our new address and telephone numbers.

'05 - '06
We have invested in tools to allow us to provide System On a Programmable Chip (SOPC) design (i.e. a soft CPU core implemented along with user logic/IP blocks in an FPGA) based on Altera's NIOSII core. The price/performance/flexibility ratio of FPGAs has improved to the point where they can now compete with ASICs for high volume applications. In applications with any significant amount of dedicated logic a CPU core can, in some cases, be implemented almost 'for free'. More details can be found on the SOPC page.

Unfortunately SOPC doesn't seem to have captured peoples imagination the way we thought it would. It still offers a lot of flexibilty and is worth considering if some custom FPGA logic is needed with along side a controlling processor .

We have available our 'Easy PCI' interface board and core based on Altera's low cost FPGA family, Cyclone. This interface board and core can be used as the pre-tested basis for custom PCI interface designs for customers, or sold in its own right. Many FPGA based PCI interface cores require an understanding of the PCI interface to use. This core has been designed to be as simple as possible to interface to, requiring very little configuration. The full core with 4 address ranges and interrupt support will be available for purchase as a core, or bundled with an evaluation board.



Please browse our web site and don't hesitate to contact us with any queries or if you think we may be able help you in any way.