Keystone Electronic Solutions was founded in 2007 by Ivan Popov and John Eigelaar after working together on various projects over the previous five years. The company today employs six development engineers and operates from its recently expanded offices in Waterkloof, Pretoria.
Keystone provides a full range of electronic engineering research and development solutions to enhance the R&D capabilities of its customers. Services range from ad hoc design consultations to very specific, expert, full turnkey product development. The company is also able to offer resource outsourcing in order to temporarily augment a customer’s development team. In this case the development team will embrace a customer idea and take full responsibility for the R&D of the product, from inception to the first successful production run. Keystone is capable of providing the necessary technical staff to provide post-production QA testing, product personalisation (firmware loading, serialisation etc,) as well as other post-production support. This enables the company to provide full technical support for the entire lifecycle of a product from inception to obsolescence management and finally, full product replacement.
Laboratory facilities
Keystone has a fully equipped electronics laboratory at its premises. A complete range of specialised telecommunications test equipment including line simulators is available. The lab is equipped with all the necessary test instruments in order to thoroughly test all interfaces of a product. The lab also hosts reference installations of all the products the company has been involved in, which assists in providing quick and meaningful support to customers in case of queries.
The company has invested in the Mentor Graphics PADS EDA suite for all hardware design capture, FPGA design, simulations and PCB layout. GSM and GPS building blocks have formed the basis of many development projects. In the field of software development, Keystone has committed itself to the use of open source compilers and operating systems. The company therefore prefers the GNU GCC compiler suite for all its processors, as this provides a uniform code base across platforms, whether developing for an 8-bit AVR CPU, a 32-bit ARM9 or PC. Keystone has also standardised on three embedded architectures in order to rapidly deploy new software platforms, and has chosen the 8-bit Atmel AVR as the core of its low range, low power solution.
The 32-bit Atmel SAM7 ARM7 range of CPU forms the core of Keystone’s mid range embedded solutions. On the SAM7 processor, the company runs the ECOS embedded RTOS in order to facilitate rapid deployment and code portability. High end solutions are based on the Atmel SAM9 range of ARM9 processors, on which embedded Linux is typically used as the OS. Back end servers and client applications as standalone or integrated solutions are all possible. Although the company has standardised on these few standard architectures for development, it is able to accommodate any other architecture that clients may require.
Successful developments
SmartJack
The SmartJack is a family of products for remote activated copper line testing (POTS, xDSL, E1 etc). The SmartJack concept has been successfully patented in South Africa. From a telco’s central exchange a remote loop back, open circuit or short circuit condition can be activated at the customer premises by the SmartJack. The standard SmartJack incorporates line and mains lightning protection and is fully transparent to AC as well as DC signal paths and is manufactured with either 4-wire or a 2-wire line interfaces. Variations of the product include a unit with an integrated ADSL/POTS splitter specifically targeted at the home ADSL market; a micro SmartJack designed to fit inside a connector at the customer premises as well as a low cost SmartJack with reduced line testing capabilities, for deployment on SHDSL installations.
MDAQ E1 monitoring and data acquisition system
The MDAQ E1 monitoring and data acquisition system is a legacy product family consisting of central office E1 monitoring racks managing several remote units of varied functionality which monitored the remote end of the E1 line as well as several I/O alarms on the customer premises. The whole system is configured locally by means of a PC-based graphical configuration tool and managed centrally by means of an SNMP-based central Element Manager running on an HP Unix server.
All development on the system was halted in 1999 when the original owner of the product pulled out of the South African telecommunications market. In 2005 the new owners of the product approached Keystone in order to catch up on six years of maintenance and technical support backup of the product. Keystone firstly had to solve several obsolescence issues hampering the production of the various elements of the product family. The company provided feasible replacements of the current obsolete components and also assisted the customer with a cost reduction exercise in order to produce the units at a competitive cost once again.
The Keystone software team then assisted the client by rectifying the backlog of outstanding defects in the embedded software of all the elements in the product family. Updates to the software were needed where obsolete components were replaced with not completely functional compatible alternatives. The FPGA design team also ported the existing FPGA designs to more cost effective device alternatives, in some cases resulting in a 60% reduction in cost. Lastly, Keystone engineers re-wrote large parts of the Unix-based SNMP Element Manager in order to improve the overall system response over the existing legacy communication channels.
Voice call recording family
Keystone was approached by a customer who was already established in the POTS (analog) voice call recording market to solve problems with production, failures in the field and quality of the recorded calls. The Keystone development team analysed the existing design and made some modifications to the existing hardware as well as some software modification in order to improve the quality of the product. Keystone took responsibility for the post-production modification, testing and programming of the product. This ensured the correct application of the post-production modifications and also guaranteed the quality of the final product before shipment.
The client also wanted to expand its product range by providing ISDN voice call recorders as well as a web based centralised call record server for call storage and selective playback. Keystone proceeded with the design and production of a 2-line /4-interface S-interface basic rate ISDN call recorder. The unit interfaces to the call record server via USB serial emulation and is a plug and play ISDN solution. A Linux based call record server which interfaces to the ISDN recording hardware and keeps a full call log in a database, as well as managing the storage of the actual recorded calls, was also developed. This server forms the core of a web-based call search and playback application that was outsourced to a third party.
Following on the success of the BRI ISDN recorder, Keystone was contracted to develop a drop-in replacement of the original POTS (analog) recorder. The company developed the replacement recorder to the same requirements as the original recorder but achieved significant improvements in audio quality and manufacturability. The replacement recorder has subsequently been subjected to independent testing and has come out top of its class ahead of 50 other local and competitors. Keystone has subsequently developed an Ethernet enabled IP-based POTS recorder. This recorder has been integrated to the Linux based call server, providing the client with multiline, ISDN and BRI capability on a single platform.
For more information contact Keystone Electronic Solutions, +27 (0)12 460 4135, [email protected], www.kses.net
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