Airflow

It seems like such a simple thing. But designing how air moves through a system can have serious consequences on operational reliability, and that makes it something SwissQual engineers want to spend time examining in detail.

Something as simple as picking the direction in which the air will flow sounds trivial, but understanding the consequences of directional airflow through the system impacts the accumulation of dust particles on connector sockets, leading to unreliable connections and lost data. And knowing that offsetting filter grill housings by a few millimeters can reduce airflow noise by up to 3dB – 50% – makes it worth building a special housing.

Using special fluid dynamics CAD tools our engineers are able to model the cooling effect of air as it moves over the circuitry, highlighting areas that need special attention to ensure they remain at peak operating conditions. It even leads to positioning of fans in the cooling fin assembly to assist the conductive cooling and ensure no dust blows over the electronics components, increasing reliability.

Environment

With customers using Diversity Benchmarker products in sub–Arctic regions in the middle of winter, SwissQual takes low temperature operations seriously. And low means really low – when drive test vehicles are parked outside overnight in January temperatures as low as –40°C/°F, starting up a unit safely the next morning takes some thought.

That’s why SwissQual tests Benchmarker equipment in ultra cold conditions in special freezer chambers, and now equips each Benchmarker unit with several 24 watt resistive heating modules mounted directly on the main chassis. Every Benchmarker is programmed to monitor several surface temperature sensors during startup to ensure minimum operational temperature is achieved. This carefully controlled approach avoids, for example, attempting to spin up and subsequently damaging frozen disk drives that contain valuable data.

And that’s not the end. Some customers use special in–car heating units that increase ambient temperatures around the system, accelerating the startup process by raising the temperature of the surrounding air as rapidly as possible. One nice side effect is that vehicles operators report warm toes on the coldest winter mornings.

Power

Another detail, but an important one, is the choice of voltage to power SwissQual vehicular systems. For a vehicle–mounted system 12V might seem the obvious choice, and it’s one other companies use because it’s easy. But 12V has many disadvantages.

SwissQual instead has chosen to use a 48V power supply. By stepping up from the vehicle’s native 12V voltage we are able to avoid damaging fluctuations and interference from the vehicle supply, increasing the reliability of our equipment.

48V power also means we can use much thinner cables running through the vehicle, reducing the weight of the system and increasing the flexibility of the installation. It’s a typical SwissQual design decision – avoiding the easy choice in order to build a better, more robust system.

Batteries

Few companies go to lengths SwissQual does to ensure reliability, and even fewer go as far as to test the batteries they use to destruction. But batteries are an important reliability component of our smart shutdown function, which allows SwissQual systems to continue operating at full power for up to 150 seconds after a loss of main power, and if necessary shutdown gracefully by saving all data without crashing – and potentially ruining valuable data.

And because SwissQual systems are designed to be used all across the world, we need to ensure our batteries can be transported safely by aircraft. We are the only company in our sector to puncture test and certify our battery backup units to UN and IATA transportation standards, including altitude simulations, external short circuits, overcharging tests, vibration, thermal and puncture tests – without any fire risk.

And all of that attention to detail means that Diversity Benchmarker is the only benchmarking system with batteries that can legally and safely be carried by international airlines.

Chassis

At the heart of every Benchmarker unit is the solid alloy chassis. Computer milled from a single solid block of metal to precise tolerances, this solid backbone provides a wide range of benefits to Benchmarker to increase reliability in the field. Traditional chassis have a fixed size and capacity for test channels, but Diversity Benchmarker’s modular system allows you to expand capacity or capability as you need it. Various systems elements can be connected together to form the perfect benchmarking system for your requirements, with the added benefit of allowing easy upgrades in the field, without the need to ship systems all over the world.

First, as an anchor for other components, it provides a rigid base for processor boards that protect the delicate circuits during daily knocks and bumps of benchmarking drive tests. This solidity protects Benchmarker from the kind of shock loads spacecraft have to withstand during launch, something SwissQual tests in the lab by thumping it with 50 gravities of shock loading. This protects systems even in extreme situations such as car crashes – customers have sent us pictures of wrecked vehicles that contain twisted Benchmarker units that are still fully operational. This strength also allows us to integrate a unique interlock and interconnection system that allows Benchmarker systems to be expanded simply by locking on another module, using each module as a piece of the backbone.

Finally the dense metal provides a perfect heat sink, allowing Benchmarker to remain cooler in extreme heat, something we also test in environmental chambers as well as studying in exceptionally hot environments in the field.

Data

Transporting the massive volumes of data generated in a drive session back to base is a daily chore that can take a lot of time and can cost a lot of money. SwissQual is the only company to have looked at this problem in detail and invented a new technique of intelligent data reduction at source.

It’s such a new approach we’ve been able to patent the technology, which means it’s a unique way of doing things that only SwissQual can provide.

When coupled with additional compression technology on the uplink, the impact can be dramatic, reducing the amount of data being transported by up to 90%, and upload times by the same degree.

Construction

SwissQual has been an innovator also when it comes to the use of advanced materials such as alloys and polymers in our products. Each Benchmarker chassis is machined from a single piece of a special lightweight alloy of aluminium, magnesium and silica that ensures perfectly smooth extrusions and precise tolerance milling.

The metal is tempered for durability through a process of precipitation hardening and specially coated with a colourless anti–corrosion protective shell.

The inherent tensile strength will stand up to pressures of more than 150 bar or 22,000 PSI – enough to withstand the forces generated inside the nozzle of a Saturn V/F1 moon rocket engine.

Materials

We use complex materials such as polyoximethylene (POM), an engineering plastic valued for high stiffness, low friction and dimensional and thermal stability, especially for precision–fit parts, as well as advanced structural foams.

Our device cradles are designed in two types of special structural foam moldings with special dielectric properties for various use cases – one that is RF transparent, another that is RF opaque – and these are produced using special injection techniques.

These approaches makes it possible to produce exceptionally lightweight but still very robust casings without using reinforcing ribs to create structural strength, thus creating smaller cradles and leaving more space for internal components.

Ecological

The advanced thermoplastic polymers and metals used in our chassis and housings are easier to recycle than traditional materials.

Because they are free of harmful substances like bromine, chlorine and antimony, polycarbonate materials have excellent ecological credentials, satisfying EU WEEE and RoHS guidelines for materials used in electrical and electronic equipment.

And of course our core chassis alloys are 100% recyclable at end of life.

Production

Many companies choose the cheapest possible path to manufacturing their products, sometimes outsourcing to countries or suppliers with very poor quality systems or procedures simply to save a few dollars. Not SwissQual.

Our manufacturing is carried out in a state–of–the–art electronics production facility in Northern Switzerland, where our products benefit from expert technicians and the very latest in automated production and testing lines.

Production standards are according to ISO 13485, a comprehensive management system for the design and manufacture of medical devices, and a visit to the production floor requires the use of special overalls and hats.

Unification

Underpinning the reliability of our hardware system is the flexibility and horsepower of our software systems.

The SwissQual NetQual family of products was the first suite-based approach to solving the problem of managing drive test data, introducing a hierarchical data architecture. A completely new approach at the time, today that architecture allows our equipment to deliver data into one central repository, where it can then be accessed and shared by many applications such as NQDI and NQWeb, unlocking the information and intelligence it contains.

SwissQual’s unified approach to data collection and management allows our customers to experience seamless access to a single font of data that can be re-used for multiple purposes, from post-processing to web reporting to optimization. This enables the extraction of more and more value from each logged event, and better productivity for engineers working overtime to stay on top of their workload.

Smart

Making complicated systems is hard. Making them easy-to-use is harder still. But SwissQual has taken giant steps in making systems that deliver complex answers very quickly.

One example is the way we not only give customers the ability to define their own bespoke KPI values, but also calculate them in real-time – live, during data acquisition. That means that the KPIs coming directly off the network drives are those the customer likes to see, without waiting for any post-processing.

And that simplification of complexity makes it easy for everyone in the team to be on the same page, talking the same language, in the fastest time possible, without any complicated setup, translations or intermediate steps that slow things down or create confusion.

Firsts

It’s not widely known that SwissQual was the first company to invent several of the product categories used in optimization and benchmarking profession. When the company was founded it created the first practical 3G benchmarking product. In 2004 it revealed the QualiPoc hand held optimization toolset, the first of its kind.

And that innovation is gathering pace. In 2010 alone SwissQual has seen three major firsts – the acceptance of POLQA and VQUAD-HD, both invented by SwissQual for HD services, as ITU standards, and the unveiling of Diversity Ranger – a complete new solution for benchmarking and optimization, done in the SwissQual way.

With a portfolio that spans 14 granted or pending patents, SwissQual is an acknowledged leader in the generation and application of advanced research – widely copied, but rarely imitated.

People

Companies often repeat the saying that people are their most important asset. At SwissQual we see it differently.

At SwissQual, people aren’t assets. They are trusted colleagues and usually friends. They are respected professionals. Sometimes they are teammates – or rivals – in the inter-departmental soccer matches. And many of those same people actually own the business.

With no outside investors or financial debt to worry about, SwissQual people spend their time focusing on customers. In fact many of the people you will meet in day-to-day interactions are the same people who started the business more than ten years ago.

And hopefully you can understand that that makes SwissQual an unusual – perhaps unique – place to work.

Algorithms

SwissQual’s experts spend a lot of time bringing new ideas to life. For example, the theoretical and practical work that goes into making our quality algorithms as precise as they can be is only obvious when they are compared – and when they are accepted by peers as the basis for the international standards used to arbitrate quality.

That level of expertise comes from a combination of experience, insight, and sheer hard work. For example, our VQUAD-HD algorithms were designed using new techniques to unlock new levels of quality complexity, and tested time and again on more than 100,000 live samples to ensure we covered all scenarios. The results in competitive testing by independent bodies have shown that SwissQual’s algorithm outperformed others by a significant margin.

Confidence

We have confidence in the measurement KPIs our equipment delivers, because SwissQual goes to unusual lengths to get the details right.

For example, normal PC audio cards have quite big operating system-dependent latencies that cause unpredictable and erroneous results when testing audio round-trip or echo measurements. These errors would be irrelevant to average PC audio listeners - but they make standard audio cards completely unsuitable for precise measurements.

That is why SwissQual engineers developed their own Analog-Digital and Digital-Analog converters, avoiding operating system-dependent latencies in audio streams and ensuring high confidence in accurate results.