Eltvor Instruments, s.r.o.

Description

Eltvor Instruments, s.r.o. (Eltvor) is a startup company founded by three HW&SW design engineers who worked together on number of time&frequency R&D projects in the past. The Eltvor company was started with the mission to continue with the time&frequency products development, especially for industrial customers. Besides government and scientific users, Eltvor long-term strategy is to provide time-as-a-service for critical infrastructure, independent of GNSS.

Competences and capabilities

The time&frequency products are based on the system block IPs (Intellectual Property) such as offset phase/frequency generation, micro-stepping and measurement. Eltvor ongoing development is targeting a laser Doppler instrument intended for industrial metrology and a simple multichannel time event meter mainly for quantum optics applications. Another Eltvor IP, namely compact camera HW&SW, proved handy in the course of VZLU's VZLUSAT-2 CubeSat development: it was donated by Eltvor to form this satellite's main payload, replacing less suitable and less mature solution. The Eltvor team re-designed, manufactured and programmed a dual camera and tailored it for the VZLUSAT-2 in a 4 months time span, operating on-board since January 2022. The core strength of Eltvor team is in signal processing design and FPGA as well as CPU implementation, time&frequency measurement, RF system design and generic embedded computing centered mostly around C, Linux, FPGAs (namely Zynq and Microchip/Actel), and numerical prototyping and batch processing in Julia. Eltvor members originated in the past decade a unique design of ground-station satellite time-transfer modem deployed in several pieces to support accurate time dissemination in frame of operational satellite navigation system. Current Eltvor's portfolio of proven technology contains a microwave transparent (bent-pipe) transponder, as well as DVB-S2 transmitter, and microwave interferometer at 125GHz.

Products/Services

• VCVS2: CubeSat-compatible OBC/DPU
• VCAM1M3-BW, VCAM1M3-RGB: 1.3MPix BW and RGB cameras
• NXDAC: custom electronic board populated with rad-hard European components: EVX12DS130B DAC and nanoXplore NG-MEDIUM FPGA
• Custom instrument development in electronics&photonics with cutting-edge performance for both terrestrial and space segments

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Major Space Projects & References

• main payload of VZLUSAT-2 satellite: two cameras (HW&SW) for Earth observation
• control computer board for the X-ray imaging detector onboard VZLUSAT-2.
• Digital Modem for Two-Way Satellite Time Transfer in the frame of ESA NAVISP program
• The Eltvor core team worked in the leading engineering roles on several ESA projects in the past:
  • comparison of optical time-transfer links for GNSS
  • optimal clock ensembling algorithms
  • manufacturing of a portable timing device

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Space Related Equipment, Labs & Certificates

• open-source flow for software (C, Linux kernel, u-boot and Julia) and hardware (KiCad for PCB design) development
• Xilinx proprietary (Vivado) as well as open-source (GHDL) tools and IP blocks for FPGA depvelopment
• standard equipment for electronics instrument prototyping, small series production and characterization such as spectrum analyser, vector network analyser, high-speed oscilloscopes, power supplies, soldering stations, etc.