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ITDev has chosen Altium Designer as its primary solution for hardware design. Altium's product offers a unified design platform, integrating PCB, FPGA and embedded software development within a single tool. This allows ITDev's engineers to implement designs more efficiently and with better optimisation across PCB, IC and software boundaries.

In addition to the purchase of software, ITDev has also taken delivery of one of Altium's Nanoboard 3000 prototyping platforms. The Nanoboard consists of a Xilinx Spartan FPGA connected to an impressive array of peripheral devices, including a colour touch screen and standard interfaces such as Ethernet, USB and SVGA. Also included is a collection of royalty-free IP (intellectual property) to further support rapid development of prototypes and their further development into finished products.

ITDev is excited at the opportunities presented by these new tools and has already made use of them on customer projects.

"We believe that our breadth of experience covering software, IC and PCB design is key to our success. An ever increasing number of products require skills in all three areas. We find that attention to these boundaries results in better products and shorter time to market. It's great to see that Altium are thinking along the same lines."

Andy Culmer, Engineering Director

ITDev Bike Club competed in Original Source Mountain Mayhem 09, the world's largest 24-hour mountain bike endurance race, to raise £858 for the Smile4Rich Appeal. Smile4Rich supports the Wessex Neurological Centre, based at Southampton General Hospital.

This year's Mountain Mayhem race was held at the picturesque Eastnor Castle deer park, near Ledbury in Herefordshire. Each 8.75 mile lap covered 1,272 feet of climbing over challenging terrain. The race saw 2,351 riders and an estimated 15,000 spectators.

ITDev runs the cycling club for its employees, friends and family. The first team comprising Steve Dwyer, Tim Culmer, Jason Anderson and Tom Baker completed 22 laps, and finished 89th out of 228 in the Sport Men category. The second team: Bruce Mitchell, Andy Culmer, Steve Goodman and Phil White, also achieved a respectable result, completing 19 laps.

Bruce Mitchell, ITDev's Managing Director said: "Mountain Mayhem is an amazing event. Everybody who competed put in a superb effort, and did a great job in raising so much money for a good cause."

Andy Culmer, ITDev's Engineering Director added: "ITDev organises a number of sports and social activities for its staff, including cycling, climbing, and rollerblading. The activities are great for building bonds between team members, and for keeping the motivation and energy levels high at work."

The Wessex Neurological Centre treats approximately 4,000 inpatients and 13,000 outpatients a year. Just a few of the conditions that are treated are Brain Tumour, Brain Injury, Stroke, Alzheimer's, Epilepsy, Spinal Injury, Brain Haemorrhage, Hydrocephalus, Motor Neurone Disease, Sleep Disorders and Dementia.

The money raised will go towards sponsoring pioneering research into new treatments for a variety of neurological conditions, and providing new equipment and facilities.

The Smile4Rich Appeal organises a number of events during the year. One of their highlights, the Smile4Rich Gala Dinner, is being held at the NV Cabaret Lounge in Southampton on Friday 16th October. If you're interested in finding out more about the charity and their events, then check out their web site: www.smile4rich.co.uk.

Over recent months ITDev has been working on a number of improvements to its on-line customer services. This activity has included upgrading some existing on-line services, as well as the development of new customer portal features and a new public website.

In addition to these service upgrades, ITDev has continued to build further reliability into its IT infrastructure. This includes the deployment of new servers and upgrades to internet connections. "One of our key objectives has been to develop a system with no single point of failure," said Andy Culmer, ITDev's engineering director. Such a system is now in place, providing a stable backbone for ITDev's continually improving client portal tools and website.

Today, ITDev was confirmed as a member of The Institution of Engineering and Technology Business Partners Scheme. This builds upon the existing individual memberships of our engineers to foster increased participation in the wide-ranging activities of the IET within our industry.

As a business partner, ITDev now has improved access to IET products and services. Those employees who have not yet achieved chartered engineer (CEng) professional registration, and wish to do so, are supported towards this goal.

ITDev was recently approached to develop a technology demonstrator for a new and highly innovative energy storage device. The demonstrator was to be in the form of a customised mobile phone, incorporating the new technology and providing a compelling illustration of its benefits.

The project included the design of the circuitry to monitor and control the charge and discharge of the storage device, as well as to provide the demonstration application. A highly compact PCB was designed and constructed, allowing the demonstrator to be housed entirely within the mobile phone, which, to the casual observer, appeared identical to the standard model.

The project progressed from initial specification, through design, manufacture and testing, to be delivered as a finished product in less than four weeks. By meeting these aggressive timescales, we allowed our client to successfully include the demonstration in a scheduled presentation to key customers.

When designing complex FPGA-based systems to tight deadlines, the time taken to evaluate the first samples of your new PCBs sits right on the critical path. One way to reduce hardware evaluation time is to develop test code for each of the FPGAs on the board. This code can be prepared well in advance of receiving populated PCBs and can be designed to quickly and automatically test all of the FPGA interfaces, giving a high level of coverage within minutes of programming the boards.

ITDev has recently been involved in the development of such test code for one of our customers. When hardware became available and the board was programmed we gave initial feedback to the customer after less than half a day. We were able to report the successful operation of all links for 8 out of 9 different interface types and isolate the error with the failing interface down to a faulty regulator.

ITDev has also made other significant contributions to the development programme. In addition to test code, we have provided functional FPGA and embedded software code amounting to almost 3 man years of effort.

ITDev Bike Club raises over £700 for Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance

ITDev Bike Club entered a team of 4 riders into Giant Mountain Mayhem 2008, the largest and most exciting 24 hour endurance mountain bike race in the European events calendar.

Nick Dyer, Tim Culmer, Steve Dwyer, and Jason Anderson, battled against wind, rain, mud, and lack of sleep during the relay race around the grounds of Eastnor Castle in the Malverns. Out of the 624 teams participating, the club finished in a highly respectable 248th place, completing 16 gruelling laps in 24hrs 12mins – and in the process raising a grand total of £709 for the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance.

Ilika Technologies have been working with ITDev to provide state of the art materials research equipment to Belgium-based Flamac.

When Flamac approached Ilika to develop a bespoke high-throughput chemical vapour deposition machine, Ilika took the decision to outsource the software development to ITDev. The required software was responsible for bringing together the 33 separate computer-controlled devices that control and monitor the system. ITDev's solution included a touch-screen-based interactive schematic of the machine showing status and providing real-time control. Additionally, the software allowed users to define command sequences through an easy to use interface and included a sophisticated simulator to allow these sequences to be tested without the need for the machine hardware.

ITDev has recently delivered PC-based software to allow users to easily evaluate, configure and design with our customer's communications ASICs. Following the success of this project, our customer has asked us to port some of this functionality to a web-based configuration tool. This Internet-based approach benefits the end user, saving them time and disk space by eliminating the need to install any software. Our client also benefits directly, by gaining visibility of the popularity of different configurations and of any requests for configurations that are, as yet, unsupported.

1 year on, ITDev's move to the Southampton Science Park has been a great success. Located alongside some of the top science and technology businesses in the UK, the science park has certainly raised ITDev's profile and has helped ITDev to win some exciting new business.

ITDev continues to expand, with new staff joining the design team over the next few months. We still have a vacancy for a Graduate Software Engineer. Please see our Careers page for more information.

ITDev is pleased to announce that it has released its proprietary Perl graphing module, Tk::PlotDataset, to the open source community. Tk::PlotDataset provides a quick and easy way to build an interactive plot widget into a Perl application.

Please click here for more information.

ITDev completes the development of complex real-time embedded software for an advanced sensor that will be used to monitor critical assets in the Oil and Gas industry.

The development project spanning 4 man-years, has been delivered on time and budget, with excellent feedback from the customer.

Continued success in business and recruitment has led to ITDev outgrowing its Chatsworth Road offices. Today, the company took up residence in Epsilon House, which is situated on the Southampton Science Park in Chilworth, Southampton. The science park provides an extremely pleasant and practical site on which to work. It also represents a thriving community of high technology businesses, several of which are existing ITDev customers.

Today ITDev announced that it has created a new post for an experienced software engineer. This is in addition to the graduate positions announced in November. ITDev's managing director, Bruce Mitchell, said, "We are continuing with our business expansion plan. This year's orders are tremendously encouraging. The addition of a hardware development service to our portfolio is opening up some exciting opportunities for us."

If you are interested in joining the design team at Southampton, then you can find more information on the Careers page.

The new ITDev site includes customer login facilities and a wealth of new information. During 2005 ITDev has expanded from its strong base of software and management services to offer a complete package of software, hardware, products and systems development. With this business expansion, we felt it was an ideal time to revamp our website and let everyone know what we have to offer. As part of the redesign, a new company logo has been developed. This logo is an evolution of our original logo, reflecting the evolution of the company.

Thanks to their ongoing success, ITDev has announced the creation of two new positions at their office in Southampton. "We are seeking one software engineer and one electronics engineer to join our design team," said Bruce Mitchell, ITDev's managing director. "2006 promises to be a year of continued growth at ITDev. We've been receiving a lot of positive feedback from our customers, and our forecasts for the coming year look extremely healthy."

If you are interested in working at ITDev, then you can find more information on the Careers page.