Industrial Inkjet

Inkjet printers are used in a wide variety of industrial applications: labelling, carpets, clothing, furniture manufacture, and many more.

Cambridge is a centre for inkjet development, and we have been involved with several different companies within the area.

A recent multi-board system for the inkjet industry required the following from us:

Design Process - from specification to production

• Hardware and firmware specification.
• System management and functional partitioning.
• Schematic layout of all system pcbs ( 6 in total ).
• responsibility for liason with pcb layout engineer, component placement and layout verification.
• generation of 'bill of materials' specifying all components and suppliers.
• Testing of prototype boards and implementing design changes required for productionisation.
• Firmware design & coding for prototype system.
• Producing documentation required for production test engineers.
• Assisting end-customers with installation of finished system, and interfacing to their factory production line.

Design Elements

• Power supply and signal conditioning.
• development of high-speed ( 250Mb/s ) communications protocols to allow multiple print heads to be controlled at the same time.
• Hardware to implement the proprietary protocols, using Xilinx FPGAs and CPLDs, to allow them to be used to control several different print heads, from different manufacturers.
• Implementation of USB 2.0 protocol for main system control, via Cypress USB processor.
• System grounding and electrical isolation management.
• VHDL firmware for Xilinx FPGAs and CPLDs.