Spotlight On
A spotlight on LDD Technology
– supplying cost effective and timely outsourced electronic design
OEMs large and small and innovators face similar problems with ever shorter design times required for increasingly complex products. At the same time there is a recognised shortage of experienced design engineers and investment in the design tools they require. The spotlight this month falls on Malcolm Locke, MD of LDD Technology, providers of outsourced electronic design
What motivated you to start LDD Technology?
A
fter graduating from Imperial College I had a very successful career as a design engineer and later as a manager of teams of engineers within a number of major electronics OEMs, mostly in the defence industry. Mergers and take-overs had the effect
of increasing bureaucracy while reducing design independence and creative input.
34 July/August 2017
Essentially the fun went out of it! Around 25 years ago I took a medium term design contract at the end of which I founded LDD Technology. We now provide a range of electronic design services to meet the needs of a wide range of customers from development houses to major international OEMs. Outsourcing the design of a project is frequently a more cost effective and timely means of delivering a new product and can free up customer’s own resources.
Components in Electronics
Why should anyone use an external design house?
The reasons for commissioning an external design house are many and varied. Internal resources may be fully committed and adding to their work load may cause delays in existing projects. Recruiting additional design engineers can be a lengthy and costly process and may not be cost effective in the longer term. Specific experience for a new project may not be available in-house for original design work, creating hardware platforms to implement software or providing device specific expertise including complex programming of FPGAs. Outsourcing electronic design offers OEMs control of costs and delivery time of projects and security of design over the life of a product, ensuring updates may be managed with ease and end of life to be planned. Users of this service may include innovators, entrepreneurs and small manufacturers who lack the internal expertise to bring their products to market, and at the other end of the scale large
OEMs who may require specialist expertise or manpower for a specific project.
What services can you offer customers?
While we prefer to help a customer develop a specification from scratch we are happy to work to an agreed spec and deliver a design, working prototype or even finished products. We have the flexibility to meet customers’ exact needs, from circuit design and printed circuit board layout to providing custom designed cores, FPGA designs or complete integrated solutions.
How do you work with your customers?
It’s a very common experience to have a customer come to us and ask for a design “yesterday” or to ask us to produce something so unusual or innovative we really have to work closely with them to make the project manufacturable. We try to work with our customers in a way that
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