Development

Hardware Development

Acadia Optronics is at the forefront of high-performance communications systems development. For the Department of Energy, Acadia is developing an FPGA-based network card for performance at 10-40 Gb/s and a matching universal optical front-end. The company has achieved 10 Gb/s operation with VCSEL transceivers, demonstrated transmission techniques capable of spanning metro-area distances, and conducted extensive realistic laboratory tests. Sophisticated performance tests of PCI Express and modular FPGA code development for a COTS prototype system under Linux and Windows have also been performed.

In the field of cryptography, Acadia Optronics has been a leader in the development of high-speed cryptographic systems. In collaboration with the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), Acadia developed a quantum key distribution system and became the major contractor in the NIST Quantum Information Testbed. Under previous contracts, the company produced the fundamental system architecture, designed virtually all of the high speed optoelectronic subsystems, directed fabrication and integration efforts, and provided day-to-day technical services and support.

Acadia has also amassed significant resources and expertise for high-speed benchmarking of both COTS and custom hardware and software. Using a specialized hardware/software testing suite, Acadia has enhanced the performance of device drivers, kernel code, and user applications by maximizing the effectiveness of underlying chipsets and hardware.

Acadia's hardware development laboratory includes the following resources:

High-speed FPGA development with tools such as Xilinx ISE for synthesis, Mentor Graphics Modelsim for simulation, and Xilinx Platform Cable USB for device programming. Development and prototyping cards include the latest technology available for PCI Express x4 and PCI Express x8 prototyping.
Hardware prototyping/debugging tools include Tektronix Logic Analyzer modules capable of 2 GHz timing/400 MHz state operation, real-time oscilloscopes, and HP/Agilent Digital Communications Analyzer mainframes with 40-50 GHz sampling optical and electrical acquisition modules.
Schematic capture and PCB layout is accomplished with OrCAD/Cadence software and accompanying high-performance development PCs.


Software Development

Acadia Optronics has amassed from previous work significant resources for design, development, and validation of software. Our team of software engineers span many programming disciplines, from embedded development to web services.

To support our customers, Acadia has developed a wide variety of middleware and end-user applications. Software engineers at Acadia deployed an encrypted streaming video application designed to showcase cryptographic capabilities for the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Acadia is currently partnering with Argonne National Laboratory to develop protocol extensions and acceleration technology for the Globus Toolkit suite of high-performance computing and file-transfer tools. We are also teaming with researchers at universities and industry to improve end-system control of network resources by integrating scheduling/signaling directly into the host operating system.


User-Network-Interface (UNI) for Acadia's end-system control architecture, developed in partnership with university and industry researchers.



Some of our capabilities include:

• Java, J2EE
• Perl, Python
• C/C++
• Device driver/kernel development in Linux and Windows
• Simulation and analysis in Matlab and IDL

Software development resources include versioning software, RAID-based file servers, open-source development environments, and Microsoft Visual Studio development platforms.