Welcome to Nial Stewart Developments Ltd.

Nial Stewart Developments is a small Edinburgh based Engineering design company specializing in FPGA design and development, with a background in high speed digital design.

Our main experience is with Altera and Xilinx FPGAs, from system level architecture design and implementation to small module level design and test in product areas from telecomms to medical devices and defence. We also do a lot of hardware design to support FPGA implementations, this has been from single small board level solutions to undertaking complete custom product design in conjunction with local software partners.

News

**HSMC General Purpose Interface Board**
This board is available for purchase, it greatly expands the IO functionality of Altera development kits via the HSMC interface.
The board was developed for use with the Cyclone III starter kit but our customers have used it on a range of other Altera kits with the HSMC connector (CIII Nios, Stratix, Arria etc)

Please see our Products page for more details of & user guide for this board




On Screen Display Module
We have developed a small FPGA based OSD controller, this generates text and user defineable characters on screen. We have this working with PAL cameras and will be adding NTSC functionality soon.
The design currently includes a Year/Month/Day/Hour/Min/Sec timer which operates stand alone. Interfaces to other embedded devices can easily be added to read and display custom outputs. The number of lines of text and characters per line is easily adjustable for custom solutions.
The design is very compact, a module based on one of the smallest Altera FPGAs will be able to generate OSD for two video streams. Moving to a slightly bigger device would allow multiple streams to be controlled much more cheaply than with the Maxim MAX4455.
This design is suitable for STV5730 replacement.

Older News....

Aug '07. Double news, we've moved again to premises with more space and facilities we'd like to welcome Alam Williams to NSD. As a graduate of four years experience Alan comes from Selex Systems where he was doing high level FPGA development for various new Radar Systems. He has come to NSD to further his low level electronics design knowledge and get more hands on board and product development design experience.

Please see our Contact Details page for our new address and telephone numbers.

'05 - '06
We have invested in tools to allow us to provide System On a Programmable Chip (SOPC) design (i.e. a soft CPU core implemented along with user logic/IP blocks in an FPGA) based on Altera's NIOSII core. The price/performance/flexibility ratio of FPGAs has improved to the point where they can now compete with ASICs for high volume applications. In applications with any significant amount of dedicated logic a CPU core can, in some cases, be implemented almost 'for free'. More details can be found on the SOPC page.

Unfortunately SOPC doesn't seem to have captured peoples imagination the way we thought it would. It still offers a lot of flexibilty and is worth considering if some custom FPGA logic is needed with along side a controlling processor .

We have available our 'Easy PCI' interface board and core based on Altera's low cost FPGA family, Cyclone. This interface board and core can be used as the pre-tested basis for custom PCI interface designs for customers, or sold in its own right. Many FPGA based PCI interface cores require an understanding of the PCI interface to use. This core has been designed to be as simple as possible to interface to, requiring very little configuration. The full core with 4 address ranges and interrupt support will be available for purchase as a core, or bundled with an evaluation board.



Please browse our web site and don't hesitate to contact us with any queries or if you think we may be able help you in any way.