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2009-11-07
Social Alarm Solution
Changes in legislation require that OEMs providing products for Social Alarms must meet a Class 1 specification on new product being introduced onto the market. This is a logical change given the importance of these devices in signalling a medical alert.
W&D was approached by an overseas client who needed to upgrade their current product to Class 1 status. The client was aware that this would require a completely new design. There was however a perceived pricing issue in the market and any new design while it would meet a much more demanding RF specification, could not dramatically increase production cost.
After careful consideration of the various technical and commercial issues, W&D decided this was an application that commercially best suited a chip based solution but technically would struggle to meet Class 1 if this architecture was adopted. W&D is a registered design centre for Analogue Devices products and this range does feature a number of integrated RF transceivers. After discussions with ADI it was apparent that a hybrid solution could be created that benefited from some aspects of the ADI device but with the RF parameters enhanced with W&D knowledge and circuitry.
The resulting module met Class 1 performance, was compact and cost effective. Without the in depth knowledge of the RF performance criteria it would not have been possible to meet the Class 1 performance using a design just based on the ADI device. The W&D screened room facility was used extensively to measure and check these parameters.
Following completion of the design, a quantity of over 10,000 production pieces were run on the W&D in-house surface mount line and these were production tested on bespoke ATE hardware.
