Sarsen Technology Introduces New FAE to Team

We are very pleased to welcome Alberto González Bassett to the Sarsen Team, where he will be providing engineering and technical support to key accounts in the military, instrumentation, transportation and aerospace sectors.

Alberto started his engineering career with Aries Ingeniería y Sistemas, Madrid, working closely with manufacturers such as North Atlantic and Iotech. He holds a MEng in Industrial Engineering from ETSII Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) specialising in Automatic Engineering and Industrial Electronics. His thesis, “Barrett Robotic Hand: Analysis and Testing for Grasping Tasks”, got an excellent grade and was written after three years of experience as a researcher in the Group of Robots and Intelligence Machines, DISAM.

Alberto has just got married and he lives in Reading, UK. In his spare time he enjoys playing basketball and going skiing. He loves watching Real Madrid football games and in his time off he likes to travel.

For more information please contact Sarsen Technology on +44 1672 511166 or send us an email.

www.sarsen.net

ZNYX Ultra5™ ZX2000 Platform Receives 2014 INTERNET TELEPHONY Product of the Year Award

Our friends at ZNYX Networks had cause to celebrate this week, as they announced on Tuesday that the Ultra5™ ZX2000 platform has received a 2014 INTERNET TELEPHONY Product of the Year Award from Technology Marketing Corporation (TMC), the world's leading business to business and integrated marketing media company.

"It gives me great pleasure to recognize ZNYX with a 2014 Product of the Year Award for its commitment to excellence and innovation," said Rich Tehrani, CEO, TMC. "In the opinion of our distinguished judges, the ZX2000 has proven to be among the best communications and technology solutions on the market in 2014. I look forward to continued innovation from ZNYX Networks."

The ZX2000's unique design provides 6 payload slots in a 5U ATCA chassis, which is 50% more than the 4 payload slots offered by Kontron, Radisys, Emerson, or ADlink. The ZX2000 switching environments delivers the highest ratio of Ethernet Ingress capacity to backplane capacity in any ATCA chassis. The 10G platform provides 60G of Ethernet Ingress for a 60G backplane, and the 40G platform provides 160G of Ethernet Ingress for a 240G backplane.

The winners of the 2014 INTERNET TELEPHONY Product of the Year are featured in the January/February 2014 issue of INTERNET TELEPHONY magazine and online at www.itmag.com.

Are you a 'Social' Company?

There are many companies whose employees are banned from using social media at work. Yet those same companies often have feeds and pages across all the best known sites. So why do some companies see social media as a beneficial resource of information for a company and its employees, and others, well, just don't?

Many companies still view social media as a “build it and they will come” exercise, creating pages on Facebook, setting up a Twitter feed, and starting a blog to share their 'message', expecting an influx of new followers and, as a result, business. But it doesn’t happen overnight, so can be percieved as a failure when it doesnt yield results immediately...

As far as our industry is concerned, business is a large percentage social. There can be months, or even years of interaction before a project starts generating income. Social media gives you a great opportunity to share news, events and general industry updates with your customers, especially when a project update isn't required.

Social networks are best used for communicating and sharing information. There is no pressure on the customer to respond, and they can take their time to read something they are interested in, without feeling ‘sold to’. That being said, because social media allows you to actually have a no-strings conversation, it helps create a community of followers that see you as more than just a business entity. They’ll view you as someone they trust, and people prefer to buy from people they trust.

Here at Sarsen we run a Blog, Twitter feed and monthly News Bytes email. We’ve just started putting together a Pinterest page, and our LinkedIn page is updated regularly. If you'd like to see what we're talking about you can click one of the following icons to find out more.

LinkedIn

News Bytes - Feb '14

Twitter

New White Paper from Trenton Systems - 'Optimizing PCIe 3.0 Backplane Designs for Performance and Reliability'

As a leader in the design and manufacture of high-performance computing solutions, Trenton Systems has continued to support PCI Express, from 1.1 to 2.0 and now 3.0, also referred to as Gen3.

BPX8093 PCIe 3.0 BACKPLANE

With each generation performance has doubled. Total bandwidth for PCIe Gen3 now reaches 32GB/s, compared with just 8GB/s for PCIe 1.1.

Keen to share their knowledge with you, the team at Trenton has just released a brand new White Paper, which explores
all the issues that are critical for achieving optimal PCIe 3.0 backplane design, as well as the performance advantages and system configurability benefits that can be achieved through a proper PCIe 3.0 backplane implementation.

Topics in this whitepaper:

• PCIe 3.0 Enhanced Performance Opportunities
• High-Efficiency Encoding Scheme in PCIe 3.0
• Enhanced Transaction Layer Features
• Active Equalization Capabilities
• Active vs. Passive Approach to Design
• Jitter Control, Impedance and Signal Loss
• Real World Deployment Issues

Drawing will be held at a time TBD and the winner will be notified with their registered email address. Choice between prizes will be up to the recipient, and mailed via US postal mail.

All of the PCI Express Gen3 backplanes and single board computers designed by Trenton are made in the USA using long-life components, and carry an industry leading 5-year factory warranty.

For more information visit – www.TrentonSystems.com

BittWare's 6U VPX Channelizer System Receives Primetime Choices Award

BittWare's 6U VPX Channelizer System is a serious bit of kit.

Featuring the powerful BittWare S5-6U-VPX (S56X) FPGA COTS board and with complete software support, the system is supplied tested and configured meaning the development time is seriously reduced - perfect for time-critical applications.
The system functions as a complete development and testing platform, ideally suited to a wide variety of applications, including satellite communications, radar, and electronic warfare.

You might have seen the 6U VPX Channelizer System on the web recently - it has been all over the news after it was chosen as a Primetime Choices product by the editors of VITA Technologies.

A Word from BittWare
“We are very pleased that VITA Technologies has recognized BittWare’s Channelizer System as a Primetime Choice Product,” stated Darren Taylor, BittWare Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales & Marketing. “BittWare’s goal is to make life easier for our customers. Our Channelizer System does just that, giving our customers access to two Altera Stratix V FPGAs, an ARM Corex-A8 control processor, ADC, DAC, and a 6U VPX rear transition module for access to VPX I/O. All of this is fully integrated with superior software tools for a very seamless design process.”

Lets Get Technical
The single slot 2U VPX system features BittWare’s S5-6U-VPX (S56X) FPGA COTS board, which utilises high-density Altera Stratix V GX or GS FPGAs and two VITA 57 FMCs (FPGA Mezzanine Cards) with direct data connections to the on-board FPGAs.

An ARM Cortex-A8 handles the control plane, and an S56X rear transition module is included to provide rear panel I/O access, including 8 QSFP connectors for high-speed serial access, along with SFP, PCIe, GigE, SATA, JTAG, and LVDS.

With complete software support including BittWare’s ATLANTiS FrameWork, which enables reconfigurable data routing, the development system allows users to design and debug in a flexible environment. Hardware-in-the-loop support for Simulink provides an additional layer of flexibility, allowing rapid control prototyping and other real-time testing.

How Do I Get One of Those??
The 6U VPX Channelizer System (VRDP-CH) is available now. For more information please contact the Sarsen Technology team on +44 1672 511166, or send us an email - info@sarsen.net