Plextek
Plextek is an innovative product development company that supports organisations to bring highly technical products and services to market. Our breadth of experience in antenna design, high-frequency electronics and digital signal processing means we are now world leaders in low size, weight and power (low-SWaP) RF communications, radar and sensing systems.
We are a product development company that supports organisations to bring highly technical products and services to market.
Our breadth of experience in antenna design, high-frequency electronics and digital signal processing means we are now world leaders in low size, weight and power (low-SWaP) RF communications, radar and sensing systems.
Innovation runs in the fabric of our company culture and our technical teams work with customers every day to ensure their projects are market leading.
This is why companies come to us to tackle their hardest engineering challenges that need outside-the-box thinking.
Products and services
Smart Cities
With sensors embedded everywhere from consumer devices to city infrastructure, we can capture and translate your environment into meaningful information through intelligent application of cutting edge technology.
Whether you’re looking for a new sensor for a niche application or a wide area network made up of thousands of nodes, our scientists and engineers have decades of experience in providing customers with field-proven solutions.
- We resolve the toughest sensing problems
- Building scaleable IoT ecosystems
- Technology independent
- Reduce product cost
Security
We understand the key security market challenges and generate solutions through to delivery, giving you the confidence that your product is delivered to the assured level of security, performance, resilience and ergonomics that you need.
With product design and manufacture done under the strictest confidence, factory systems are often designed with security as the top priority. You need a partner who understands your security needs, but can deliver high quality innovative solutions.
Services:
Government & Public Safety
Transport
Critical National Infrastructure
Strategic Consultancy
One of Plextek’s strengths is that it backs its technical implementation skills with consultancy in the form of strategic advice and studies.
Either as a prelude to product development or as a stand-alone activity, Plextek can help clients identify and evaluate opportunities resulting from new markets and technologies. We address a wide range of applications and market sectors within electronics, including automotive, consumer, defence, industrial, medical, security, telecoms, transport and utilities.
The combined experience of our 70+ technical design and manufacturing experts enables us to offer a unique and practical business perspective.
We work for both private and public sector clients including governments, financial investment firms, manufacturers and network operators, assisting with strategic evaluation and decision-making to inform stakeholders, identify risks and improve operational and business effectiveness.
Plextek’s contribution is particularly powerful when clients are seeking to move into new areas of technology or need a fresh view on how existing skills and assets can be exploited in new markets. We bring independent and innovative thinking to business and engineering plans, injecting realism based on having successfully undertaken and delivered several hundred projects.
Sensor Systems
We have engineered systems to measure a great range of different parameters, extracting from radar sensors that provide spatial information about the world through to contact sensors that detect electrical signals on the human body or buried sensors that detect the presence of a parked car. These often require a carefully crafted combination of sensor physics, analogue signal manipulation and digital signal processing.
Signal Processing
Typically, systems use signal processing as the means to extract from, process or prioritise high order data from gathered sensor output for presentation to another system element.
An effective signal processing chain can operate in the real world with the required performance levels and reliability to understand real world effects. We understand this challenge and derive high quality solutions through modelling, mathematics, complex DSP algorithms, hardware and software engineering.
Product Design
In everything that we interact with in our daily lives, product design plays an integral part.
Developing complex systems in a multidisciplinary team is how we work on a daily basis. We work to develop innovative product design whilst ensuring integrity in the whole system.
- Mechanical design – Geometric tolerancing, 2D, 3D, Creo, parametric
- Process analysis – DFM, DFA, DFT, DFMA, Process control
- Value engineering – Castings, progression tools, Injection moulding, assembly modelling, materials analysis
- 3D modelling – Model Based Definition, Creo, Spaceclaim, Keyshot texture rendering
- Additive Manufacture – SLS, FDM, MLS, DMLS, Digital printing, Rapid Prototyping, Digital Metal
- Mechanical modelling – Importing ECAD files, Stress analysis, Thermal analysis, Kinetic moment analysis
- Manufacturability – DFM, DFA, DFT, DFMA analysis
- PCB design – copper balance, Impedance control, RF, Metal backed, HDI, Flexible circuit, multilayer, Printed filters, exotic materials, Mentor Graphics
Radar Systems
Plextek has a long heritage in the development of optimal RF solutions specifically designed to meet the needs of high performance Radar and Communication applications. Our multidisciplinary “ground up” approach enables us to clearly identify our client’s requirements and work collaboratively to meet the client needs.
Whether it is adapting and configuring existing technology for a specific desired application or designing new applications entirely; our team, paired with our laboratory and testing capabilities, can give our clients world-leading radar technologies.
Manufacturing
Plextek’s manufacturing team are able to translate your ideas into robust, scalable, tested and approved designs that we can transfer to manufacturing using suppliers selected by us or our client.
Our PCB and Mechanical teams are co-located and share data to allow an agile design process responding to inevitable changes in design requirements. Collaborative working with third-party industrial designers is common, and they are treated as an extension of the family.
Embedded Systems
Embedded systems are the core of what we do; they deliver the intelligence that makes products work.
Our team has developed a wide range of embedded systems including IoT smart city applications, medical devices, imaging technology and communication systems. Our approach is multidisciplinary, using our wide expertise in all areas of hardware, software and firmware to create reliable, secure systems that meet our customers’ needs.
Data Exploitation
Data is at the heart of everything, and there is no doubt that for good or for ill we can’t move through the modern world without leaving a digital footprint and generating data.
Whether it’s a custom sensor application or a massive IoT cloud deployment, there is nearly always data to be moved, managed, and understood. Our expertise is to apply technology that meets and grows with data requirements. We can build the infrastructure to manage the data, use machine learning to interpret your data, and create a user interface to visualise and present your data.
Communication Systems
Communications Systems are intrinsic to our heritage as providers of bespoke solutions. The effective exchange of information in our technology allows seamless integration into wider networks or as standalone ready to implement systems.
Our multidisciplinary “ground up” approach enables us to clearly identify our client’s requirements and work collaboratively across their system. Whether it is adapting existing networks for new markets or inputs, configuring technology for a specific desired use or designing new applications entirely; our team, paired with our laboratory and testing capabilities, can give our clients world-leading communication technologies.
Antennas & Propagation
Antennas form an important and integral part of many of the wireless products we create.
An investment in 3D electromagnetic field solvers, together with years of practical experience allows us to rapidly design custom antenna solutions in any useful frequency band. Our recent work at mm-wave frequency is underpinned by an ability to model structures accurately and employ advanced fabrication methods.
