ICC provides expertise in embedded system product development. Outlined below are some specific ways in which ICC can help your company, and why it might make good financial sense to call us.

engineering resource management

If your business already has an internal engineering design capability you may experience sudden peaks of demand. For example, an opportunity arises to sell to a new customer, but the customer demands changes to an existing product, or some extension to your product range but your in-house resources are tied up with existing developments. You could use on-site contractors, but the chances are that the next time a peak occurs the same people won't be available. You are repeatedly paying for the learning curve. ICC offers continuity of personnel so that you don't have to keep paying for that learning curve.

On the other hand you may find, as many businesses do, that you don't have a need for the continuous development process required to make employing your own development staff worthwhile. Using ICC gives you the ability to have an on-demand development resource. You can also call us for technical advice and to attend meetings, or act as a technical representative with customers. This is how we work with many of our customers.

embedded TCP/IP

Increasingly large companies are using TCP/IP and internet based technologies for asset management. Recently more and more of our work has been embedding internet browser based interfaces into even very small embedded systems.

working with industrial comms protocols

We have considerable experience with industrial and automotive communication protocols.

firmware for embedded microcontrollers

We write code for firmware in C, C++ and, where appropriate, assembler.

We write code for user interfaces using Microsoft Visual C++, Delphi, C++ Builder, SQL, HTML and Java. We can work with you or your technical writers in the preparation of integrated manuals and help systems.

reducing development cost and time to market

We have experience in designing appropriate software configuration, and source and executable library management systems to maximise code re-use and portability for embedded software and firmware. Getting these systems right can significantly reduce time-to-market and increase software reliability, particularly if you have or envisage having a range of products addressing similar product areas or have a need to customise your product for specific customers or target markets.

legacy systems

Sometimes it is important to extend the lifetime of legacy systems. This can often be a highly cost effective way to get a a new product to market more quickly than re-designing from scratch. We have considerable experience in working with customer's legacy systems. This can also free your own engineers to concentrate on next generation products.

software/hardware tradeoff

Our expertise in both electronics design and firmware development means we are able to balance production costs against development costs, and performance against flexibility by carefully selecting what functionality is implemented in electronics and what is implemented in software.

Software is updatable, increasingly while products are in service, so the right choices here can reduce productions costs, and also give flexibility for future enhancements to your products.