Information Technology Group is a
small-business
IT Design House and Project
Management Company located in Bucharest, Romania, specialized in
electronic
and
software engineering projects. The company is 100% Romanian,
and was legally registered as "Information Technology Group, srl." in
1998.
All the startup funding was provided by
AST-Israel in 1998, and during the period 1998 @:@
2000 Information Technology Group had an exclusivity contract with AST.
As of January 1st 2001, Information Technology Group becomes an
independent IT project management company, operating its own software-
and electronic design house.
The most valuable company asset today consists of its
market-proven
project management and design methodologies portfolio, based on
its
strategies for assembling and operating world-class engineering teams
that are adapted to a given project. The constant focus on the
quality-of-service allowed the company to incrementally build a
credible track record on the international market, such that
Information Technology Group's customer portfolio today includes
multi-million dollar companies located in hi-tech countries like
Israel, UK, USA, and a world-class billion-dollar company headquartered
in California, USA.
@strip
Statutory change
On September 22nd 2008, Information Technology Group (IT Group) ended
its operations as a registered company in Romania; starting this date,
IT Group operates as an
informal
collective focusing almost exclusively on R&D projects, and
the 'itgroup.ro' website will be maintained as a showcase for IT
Group's projects and as a contact point for the IT Group staff.
@
R&D Partnerships
IT Group is actively seeking R&D partnerships in the IT sector.
Most of the company's previous collaborations were based on IT Group's
own ideas and have been governed by a negotiated version of the
IT
Group NDA; however, IT Group
is also open to collaborations based on its potential partners' ideas
and projects.
An archived version of the IT Group NDA is available for download
here.
Design Methodologies Hallmarks
Our design methodologies were developed around three key objectives:
- to obtain error-free designs at the very first iteration;
this objective is addressed by allocating an unusually large
fraction
of the design time to the analysis and preliminary documentation
stage,
and then using systematic testing during the various implementation
stages
- to design zero-tweak portability solutions; this is
achieved by using only open standards-based cross-platform languages
and technologies for both our software and hardware products
- to obtain a very high level of reusability; this is
achieved by using hierarchical structures (where ever possible) and
generic messaging-based mesh topologies, all implemented using
parameterized, object-based design methodologies
Electronic Engineering
Our main electronic engineering activity consists of the elaboration of
product specifications based on our customers' requests (and feedback),
and the development of synthesis-compliant HDL models. We have
over
20 years of experience in VHDL modeling, and over 25 years of
experience in electronic design.
We currently use a
Synopsys
synthesis-compliant subset of the
VHDL-93
standard as
the hardware description language of choice for digital circuit
designs, and we test our designs on
Xilinx's
freeware
cross-platform
WebPack IDE, a fully-featured VHDL/Verilog simulator based on the
industry-standard
ModelSim
engine. This workflow, together with some other design techniques,
allows us to produce portable designs that have a predictable
performance when ported from one technology library to another.
For the design of analog circuits and mixed-signal frontends we use
both the open source
GNU
Octave suite and custom-built tools, and we verify all of our
analog designs with RTI Microwave's freeware
SANA
circuit simulator and/or the
Qucs
open source simulator.
Previous electronic designs covered various areas, including low power
and high power RF with complex analog filter designs (the IT Group
founders were the first independent collective in Romania to design and
build a fully standards-compliant digital synthesis FM transmitter,
targeting the then-untapped post-communist East-European FM radio
stations market of the early '90s), programmable and non-programmable
digital equipment (e.g. microprocessors, digital signal processors,
network processors, security processors, etc).
Our current h/w portfolio includes internally designed,
proven-in-silicon microprocessors, high performance DSP and Encryption
cores, and discrete audio and RF circuits.
Software Engineering
Our software engineering efforts are primarily related to supporting the
hardware that we design; however, separate software development is also
part of our activity. We have
over 25 years of experience in
software design, including such areas as utility libraries,
compilers and
interpreters, digital circuit simulation, software signal processing,
small-scale data bases, and various internet technologies.
In order to allow for maximum portability of our applications, we
currently use
standard C++ with STL
as the main programming language, and the open source
Qt
SDK for cross-platform OS
integration; similarly, we develop our database modules with a strong
focus on standards compatibility by targeting the well-established open
source
PostgreSQL and
SQLite
DBMS implementations, and we
design our web clients for strict-mode
HTML5
/
JavaScript /
CSS3
compliance. This
software design strategy allows
trivial porting
of our software packages to any of the major desktop and server
operating systems (Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS) with virtually
no modifications and only minimal OS-dependent configuration files (the
cumulated OS-specific configuration files for a software project are
typically less than a page of source code).
Documentation
We consider a product's documentation to be a
crucial factor in
determining the product's usability and maintainability, and we take
great pride in the quality of the documentation that accompanies all of
our projects. All our documentation is issued in open-source
cross-platform
OpenDocument
HybridPDF
format, readable in any modern
PDF
reader and editable with
the
LibreOffice 4+ suite.