A smart grid equipment manufacturer developing advanced power transmission line monitoring systems faced critical reliability failures in early production units. Their embedded system, designed to provide real-time condition monitoring of high-voltage transmission lines (5kV to 35kV), experienced persistent backplane-based serial communication problems that threatened customer relationships and market adoption. The original design services provider became unresponsive, leaving the client without engineering support to diagnose root causes or implement corrective actions. With key early adopters experiencing system failures, the client required immediate, comprehensive embedded system redesign to meet operational reliability targets and preserve their market position.
The Details
Industry
Energy & Environment
CAPABILITIES APPLIED
The project presented urgent technical and business-critical challenges requiring rapid diagnostic expertise and comprehensive system redesign:
Critical Production Reliability Failures: Early production units deployed at customer sites experienced recurring backplane communication failures, disrupting real-time power grid monitoring capabilities and threatening the viability of the product line with early adopters.
Unresponsive Original Design Partner: The design services provider responsible for the original subsystem hardware became progressively less engaged, failing to provide necessary engineering support for root cause analysis or corrective design modifications.
Time-Critical Customer Retention: Key early adopters experiencing reliability issues placed the client’s reputation and future sales pipeline at risk. Resolving system failures quickly was imperative to retain customer confidence and enable market expansion.
Complex Multi-Board System Architecture: The embedded system comprised five unique board types operating in a backplane architecture, requiring comprehensive analysis across mechanical, electrical, and software domains to isolate failure modes and implement effective solutions.
Legacy Hardware Inventory Management: The client possessed significant inventory of manufactured boards from the original design. Any redesign solution needed to support flexible backward compatibility, enabling mixed revisions of new and old boards to coexist without requiring complete inventory disposal.
High-Voltage Precision Measurement Requirements: The system demanded high-precision, simultaneous three-phase voltage and current measurements in challenging electrical environments, requiring low-noise analog design, controlled impedance routing, and robust signal integrity.
Production Scalability Demands: Beyond resolving immediate reliability issues, the redesign needed optimization for design-for-manufacturing (DFM) and design-for-test (DFT) to support high-volume production targets.
Re:Build delivered a comprehensive embedded system redesign that eliminated reliability failures and established a production-ready platform for market expansion.
The project executed in three sequential phases: detailed failure analysis with design modification recommendations, full hardware and software redesign implementation, and on-site support during functional and environmental testing with final production design refinement.
Comprehensive hardware redesign addressed all five board types in the system architecture. The custom six-slot backplane with hot-swap support received circuit and PCB layout enhancements addressing signal integrity and communication reliability. The main processor board featuring TI OMAP processor, LP DDR2 memory, Spartan6 FPGA, 10/100 Mbit Ethernet, NAND Flash, Micro-SD, and USB 2.0 underwent complete refresh with optimized 10-layer, via-in-pad, controlled impedance PCB layout. Power board, analog input board, and analog sensor board designs received targeted improvements ensuring robust performance in high-voltage monitoring environments.
Software development included Linux kernel customization, u-boot bootloader modifications, board support package (BSP) updates, and custom device drivers ensuring stable communication across the redesigned hardware platform. AI-based algorithms were developed to enhance system calibration and measurement accuracy, improving precision in real-time power transmission line monitoring.
A critical innovation enabled flexible backward compatibility, allowing mixed configurations of new and old board revisions to operate together. The software architecture supported all valid hardware permutations from a single binary installation package, eliminating complex field configuration procedures and enabling gradual inventory transition without waste.
FPGA development in VHDL coordinated with the OMAP microcontroller to manage high-speed data acquisition and processing. Mixed-signal circuit design with low-noise precision ADCs maintained measurement accuracy in electrically noisy power grid environments.
The redesigned system eliminated reliability failures, enabling the client to retain early adopters and confidently pursue market expansion. The flexible compatibility approach prevented inventory write-offs, reducing financial impact while accelerating deployment of the improved system.
