AEROSPACE CONSULTING - Electronics Engineering Consultants

Celebrating 29 years of RF, microwave, wireless, analog, and antenna design, development, and prototyping

What is Aerospace Consulting?

Aerospace Consulting is an independent wireless, rf, antenna, gps, microwave, wireless, and analog design, development, and consulting firm dedicated to helping clients design, develop and prototype wireless, RF, microwave, analog, DSP, keyfob, short range, ultra-wideband, Zigbee and GPS (Global Positioning System) circuits, systems, and products. The firm is also expert in analyzing and troubleshooting existing client designs. Although the bulk of the activity has been in the areas of RF, wireless, and microwave circuits and systems design and development, GPS applications, and FCC Part 15 unlicensed products, clients have been assisted in other areas as well, including software development, technology evaluation for mergers and acquisitions, expert witness services, circuit and system simulation, technical writing, proposal assistance and guidance, and circuit board layout using PCAD and Altium Designer. Aerospace Consulting has been in business for 29 years, and the principal engineer, Ed Troy , has over 37 years of experience (29 as a consultant) in the areas of wireless, RF, microwave, GPS, and analog circuit and system design and development. He has worked on many circuits and systems, including transmitters, receivers, synthesizers, phase locked loops, power amplifiers, VCO's, low noise amplifiers, dsp designs, and DDS's (Direct Digital Synthesizers), SAW transmitter (keyfob devices), and various low power short range communications systems. Aerospace Consulting has been involved in a wide range of projects, from complex military and avionics products, to low-cost consumer devices. Aerospace Consulting is committed to solving your engineering and technology related problems quickly and with a high degree of confidentiality. Although Aerospace Consulting has a full RF, microwave, and analog laboratory and software suite, consulting services are also available, on a daily rate, anywhere in the world. Projects from a few hours to many months duration are considered. Aerospace Consulting works with clients ranging from 1 person startups and inventors to multi-billion dollar corporations and government agencies and laboratories.

What kind of RF, wireless, microwave, and electronic design, development, and prototyping work does Aerospace Consulting perform?

That is a hard question to answer simply, since the range of work has been so broad, ranging from contract design and development to simulation and troubleshooting of circuits and systems to consulting on an hourly, daily, or retainer basis, to assisting clients to solve problems with their own electronic designs or designs they have purchased from others. Producing circuit board layouts on very short notice using Altium Designer or PCAD is another activity that Aerospace Consulting performs for clients. (As many companies have found out from bad experience, it is important to have circuit board layouts for rf, microwave, wireless, and high speed digital boards performed by firms like Aerospace Consulting because layout is critical at RF and microwave frequencies and you need a designer that is experienced with layouts in the RF and microwave frequency range.) Work can be performed at Aerospace Consulting's facilities, or anywhere in the world the client needs assistance. A very brief summary of some of the services that are offered to clients, or products that have been produced, as well as the facilities available, is described below.

When performing design and development in the RF and microwave range, it is critical to have the correct software tools for simulation and modeling of circuits and systems BEFORE you start the circuit board layout process. A little time simulating with the proper tools can save many times that amount of time in test and debug, and may even save a circuit board re-design, since at RF and microwave frequencies, everything that goes into the design and layout matters, and simulation can often identifiy problems early in the design process. It can also be used to troubleshoot designs that are not working as they should. The software that Aerospace Consulting uses are the following:

And, speaking of software, Aerospace Consulting owns the following software packages:

Agilent Genesys, with all of its modules including Spectrasys, Momentum GXF, Harbec, Cayenne, and all of the various synthesis modules for filter, matching, oscillator, and pll design. These tools are for linear and non-linear RF, microwave, and analog circuit and system design and develop. The Momentum GXF module is for Electromagnetic (EM) analysis and antenna simulation. It is especially useful for designing microstrip patch antennas and antenna arrays, as well as other planar antennas and structures. Aerospace Consulting has been a beta tester for Genesys for a while.

Modelithics complete library for Genesys - This software provides highly accurate, substrate and pad-pattern scalable models for many families of capacitors, resistors, inductors, transistors, diodes, and other devices. With these models, the simulation results are virtually identical to the measured results on an actual circuit board since the models take into account the various stray aspects of real components, including the characteristics of the pads and the circuit board material.

Agilent SystemVue - This is an extremely powerful system simulator which can not only perform detailed simulations on complex communications systems, but it can also generate C and C++ code for integration into various DSP projects. Aerospce Consulting has also been a beta tester for SystemVue for a while.

IntuSoft Intuspice - This is a very powerful Spice simulator

Singula - This is another Electromagnetic analysis package. It is a 3D full wave high frequency solver.

Chronos - This is a very powerful full 3D Electromagnetic analysis package. It can simulate any arbitrary 3D structure. It is very similar to HFSS and CST Microwave Studio. It includes both a FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) solver and a MoM (Method of Moments) solver.

Altium Designer - This is our preferred software for circuit board layout. It can also be used for FPGA development, along with the Altium Nanoboard, which Aerospace Consulting also owns.

SolidWorks - This is a very powerful 3D cad package for mechanical design and packaging. It also integrates with Chronos to expedite the design of 3D structures to be analyzed in the Chronos 3D EM simulator

PCAD - Although we don't use it much after acquiring the Altium Designer software, we do have PCAD for circuit board layout if a client prefers that platform.

Matlab - This is a powerful, general purpose mathematics tool for calculation and graphing.

Mathematica - This is another powerful math tool

Mathcad - This is another powerful math tool

While Aerospace Consulting does not currently own the following software pacakges, they have been used on various projects and can be used on future projects by leasing them for a specific job.

Ansys HFSS - A very powerful 3D FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) EM (Electromatic) simulator that is very similar to Chronos and Singula which Aerospace Consulting does own.

CST Microwave Studio - Another very powerful 3D EM (Electromagnetic) simulator that is very similar to Chronos and Singula which Aerospace Consulting does own.

AWR Microwave Office - A very powerful RF and microwave linear and non-linear simulator. It also includes an EM (Electromagnetic) simulator. It is very similar to Aglient Genesys, which Aerospace Consulting does own.

Agilent ADS - A very powerful RF and microwave linear and non-linear simulator. It also includes an EM (Electromagnetic) simulator. It is very similar to Agilent Genesys, which Aerospace Consulting does own.

Aerospace Consulting also has a small machine shop for building test boxes and fixtures out of aluminum and brass.

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