Embedded Design

VIP Project

Commercial Sonar

This project was to produce a high speed data buffering system to be placed between a sonar array and a tape based recording system.

Whenever the tape based recoding system failed the boat needed turn around and redo the entire sonar sweep at a cost of many hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Prototyping hardware was supplied that was incompatible with existing systems and device drivers. This was Resolved by modifing the supplied hardware and rewriting sections of the device driver..

This device driver rewrite exposed 2 flaws in the firmware.

The first was issues to do with the timing of low level operations which caused failures in the operation of the bus. This was overcome by adding stretegic "nop" commands.

The second issue was a failure in the operting of the firmware to handle data throughput at sustained rates. This was only in one direction of transmission. The was resolved by increasing the level of storage for buffering.