Designing for the Future
Many companies, for 'time to market' considerations, concentrate on product specific development; producing only what is necessary to change an existing product into a new offering. This is an understandable strategy but gets increasingly difficult the further one gets from the original design.
Products that contain software can be particularly sensitive to this as the original base code may not have been designed to allow extensive adaptation. Software is often the primary cause of a delayed project launch as inadequately designed software can take many months to get to a stable, let alone bug free state.
The engineering team at Linea Research were in the privileged, perhaps unique, position of having both extensive experience and starting with a blank sheet of paper. It was recognised that what was needed was a series of modular platforms, both for the electronics and the software, that could be rapidly arranged into different products without extensive reworking of the core technologies. However, to achieve this significant time would need to be spent without any specific products being produced.
Being a new company Linea was able to concentrate on developing these technology platforms without the distraction and pressure of supporting existing product lines. Focusing initially on power modules suitable for OEM use, but with the intention of developing stand alone amplifiers and signal processors firmly in mind for the future, effort was expended in four key areas: