Who

Leeward Engineering is a one person company of me, Duane Clark. It was started in April, 2000. I am concentrating primarily on FPGA design, and the design of boards using FPGAs.

I have been in the electronics industry for 20 years. The previous 12 years were at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where I did hardware and software engineering primarily on the SRTM shuttle borne radar (and its predecessor SIRC), and on MISR, a satellite experiment for global heat budget measurement.
 

Services

• FPGA design and testing.
• PCI interface and backend design.
• Reed-Solomon encoder/decoder design. I have designed fully parameterized high performance VHDL RS codec cores, that support both CCSDS and standard RS codes. For example, the CCSDS RS255,223 decoder will operate at >70MBps with very low latency, and takes up about half of a XCV600E chip.
• Low level software, primarily in C.
  
• I like and use EDT boards, which are highly reconfigurable and versatile PCI boards, based on Xilinx FPGAs. And they come with an extensive and easy to use driver and API library for Windows, Solaris, and Linux. I have done several backend designs for customers based on these boards.
  

Some Projects by Leeward Enginereering

• The digital subsystem of the Cloudsat Profiling Radar satellite, consisting of command, telemetry, and data acquisition and compression. Done in Actel radhard FPGAs.
• A board for testing THAAD components, consisting of a PCI board with Xilinx FPGAs for commanding and snooping of the command/control bus.
  
• A telemetry acquisition system for the space shuttle and space station. It is a highly configurable system, able to transmit/receive serial data in a wide variety of formats. It handles frame sync, time tagging, pseudo randomization decoding/encoding, and CCSDS Reed Solomon decoding/encoding of both interleaved and normal data. Based on Xilinx FPGAs.