Every active system depends to some degree on electronic subsystems. CSA has an in-house capability to design, assemble, test, and integrate electronic subsystems to support the control of physical systems. CSA provides a range of electronics system solutions from standard designs to custom products, all of which enable more rapid integration of control systems. These include high-precision sensor signal conditioning and compact efficient actuator power amplifiers. CSA works with a select group of vendors who provide advanced fabrication and design capabilities. In combination with expertise in advanced transducers and devices and digital control systems, CSA's electronic systems capabilities allow total integration of active control solutions.

Sensor Signal Conditioning

Sensor signal fidelity is critical to the effectiveness of an active control system, particularly one used to control vibration, precision motion or acoustic noise. CSA has experience developing low noise signal conditioning for several types of vibration, motion and acoustic sensors. A partial list of transducer conditioning examples includes: custom piezoelectric wafer load cells, polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) strain sensors, electret microphones, ICP-style accelerometers and load cells, and thermal sensors.

Power Amplification

CSA develops custom power electronics for a wide range of actuators. CSA has experience designing high voltage linear amplifiers for electromagnetic and piezoelectric actuators. CSA has also developed pulse width modulation (PWM) amplifiers for driving inductive loads including electromagnetic actuators, magnetostrictives, and capacitive loads including piezoelectrics. Optimization of amplifier characteristics, such as designing for voltage or current control, or trading bandwidth and ripple, allows for improved performance of control systems. CSA is aware of off-the-shelf solutions and integrates discrete transistors, IC amplifiers, and complete modules as appropriate in particular applications.

Design

CSA’s electrical design capabilities include complete analog, digital and mixed signal modeling and hardware development. Beyond analytical and closed form models, Matlab and Multisim are used to perform numerical system analysis. CSA's well stocked laboratory allows rapid breadboarding of prototype designs for refinement before moving the final hardware. CSA uses PowerLogic and PowerPCB for development of PCB layout artwork. A network of vendors allows rapid turnaround of completed custom and standard boards.

Microcontrollers

Microcontroller based control systems are an attractive alternative to conventional analog systems in many applications. The added programmability is useful, and often the exceptionally high throughput processing capabilities of a DSP are unnecessary. In such cases, microcontrollers made by Microchip, Texas Instruments and others are readily adaptable to feedforward and feedback control systems. Recent CSA microcontroller projects include motor control, active vibration damping, active vibration cancellation and health/status monitoring. CSA has also developed a standard microcontroller-based embedded control component that allows rapid integration of control systems without the requirement of additional hardware development.