Development
Laboratory and medical instruments, electronic control systems and robotic motion systems development is mission of PiKRON company. The company unites developers who have long record of challenging projects in their curriculum and designed more award winning instruments in PiKRON's almost 20 years history.
Electronics from Femtoampere to Heavy Power Stages
The innovative analog-to digital converter solution has been invented to fullfill need of HPLC spectrophotometric detectors signal needs which has low noise conversion with more than 20-bit resolution with equivalent resolution of input signal about 10 fA even in full signal range.
More 8-, 16- and 32-bit systems microcontroller systems has been designed. Our developers have experience with extremely broand CPU and MCU architectures range:
Intel 8051 (552, 517), Intel x86, AMD Elan 520, TMS320C3x DSPs, FreeScale 68332/376, PowerPC (MPC 555, MPC 5200), Echeleon NeuronCHIP, Microchip PIC 8 and 32 bit, Renesas H8S, Super-H (SH-7760), ARM (i.MX, LPC2xxx, LPC1xxx, i.MX53, i.MX6, AM335x AM43xx, Xilinx Zynq, STM32, nRF51, TMS570, BCM2835/6), MIPS (PIC32) and RISC-V.
The work with MCUs and CPUs has been from first boot up to applications level in most cases including own widget set for smallest devices up to complex Qt5 base applications running in distributed environmet. The typical route to full solution is GNU toochain preparation and compilation, boostrap procedure preparation for boards with new CPUs and support code and libraries preparation. We have experience with GNU/Linux, RTEMS, NuttX and bare hardware setup preparation and BSP porting.
PiKRON's portfolio includes design of cosumer grade peripherals and sensors hardware and software design for BlueTooth Low Energy and own mesch network RF connected devices (nRF51 based and other).
Some of our designs utilize even self tuned soft-CPUs implemented in FPGA extended by units for some operations speedup and peripherals for complex motion control tasks (Xilinx and Altera). But we are able to build specialized peripherals with analog frontends based even on price optimized FPGAs form Microsemi.
But we do not limit ourselves to microelectronic range. Many power electronic stages has been designed as well.
Our motion controllers are used in applications spread over whole world. There can be count three our MARS-8 controllers in next picture of one of more robotic laboratories at Czech Technical University in Prague.
These controllers have replaced much bigger and unmaintainable original BOSCH and CRS A465 C500 controllers.
The hardware design is typically done directly to fullfill specific needs of application or range of instruments which mechanical design is done by the company or at house of some of our partners and instruments producers. But more electronic design have been implemented on direct query from researcher at Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, universities and other European and national project researchers.
The picture shows one of such designs - a power stage for parallel kinematic robot controlled from Matlab-Simulink Real-Time-Workshop-Target over Humusoft MF-624 I/O card.
Laboratory and Medical Instruments
PiKRON's domain is even precise mechanic design. We have developed from initial drawing line and whole range of HPLC instruments. We have kept the project over time when there has been no producer for it and when INGOS has been founded to produce these instruments, we have kept the quality and design innovations for all the years.
These instruments are used in routine laboratories and even in leading research institutes. Many LC5000 setups serve in Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry AS CR for example. Even our oldest previous generation LC4000 is still in daily use there.
We provide electronic hardware, instrument firmware and control and communication software development and coordination for AMV company. These instruments have received more awards as well.
More can be found in Medical Instruments Development section.