Pushing the State-of-the-Art for Customer Satisfaction      To provide customers with higher performance and lower cost electronic subsystems, we push the state-of-the art in many disciplines - electronic design, optics, embedded processors, and manufacturing. To ensure that such advanced work interfaces cleanly and exactly to our customers’ products, we establish collaborative teams for extensive face-to-face coordination with customer engineering and manufacturing personnel throughout research, development, prototyping, and production. Case Histories: Here are five examples of recent achievements: 1. RF Plasma control To reduce the likelihood of collateral damage to both surgical patients and equipment, we developed advanced embedded algorithms to control more precisely the generation of RF plasma at the tip of a surgical probe. The collaborative work enabled us to use advanced electronic design techniques to reduce the size and cost of the power subsystem, resulting in a cost savings of 75% to the OEM. 2. Laser lighting control The need for more light for endoscopy and arthroscopy led us to develop an advanced laser lighting system combining red, green, and blue sources to produce 10 watts of white light. In a synergistic development, the combined laser and control subsystem can produce 64 million colors as well as white. The colored light enables surgeons to optimize procedures utilizing feedback from specific tissues. The cost of this subsystem is competitive with Xenon and LED subsystems. 3. High voltage medical source To eliminate current leakage and radio emissions in a highvoltage surgical system we developed a new transformer and control system, for a switching power supply, that can be used with a wide range of AC input. Our work enabled the OEM’s instrument to satisfy international medical standards. 4. Ultrasonic transducer driver Ultrasonic transducers require very specific drive electronics. Every type of transducer has traditionally required a unique driver. We developed, and patented, a single, digital ultrasound driver for the entire range of 20 to 60 KHz – which can be used for virtually any transducer. 5. Thermoelectric chiller power supply The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) challenges manufacturers to meet decreasing resource consumption goals. Thermoelectric chillers have the potential to reduce energy consumption by more than 50%, compared to Freon chillers. However, existing 6 kW power supplies for such chillers are unreliable, expensive and too massive. For an OEM we developed a new power supply from the ground up, with precise feedback control for optimum energy consumption, a smaller footprint, and a lower cost.