J. Gordon Electronic Design was founded in 1987 with a commitment to providing quality product development services. Our initial focus was on electronic device design for OEM's in the upper Midwest regional area. Most of those devices were stand-alone embedded microprocessor-based controls with both an electronic hardware and an embedded firmware component.  Most firmware was written with a "roll-your-own" interrupt-driven operating system for an 8- or 16-bit microprocessor.  Most projects were handled by a single engineer.  A typical product life for our designs was ten years or more.

Over time, the character of our company has changed to meet the challenges of the changing business and technology landscape.

Firstly, more and more of our designs were required to communicate with one or more other devices, sometimes a desktop PC, sometimes other devices as part of a distributed control network, sometimes via the internet.  Over time, we have gained significant experience with many communication protocols (TCP/IP, USB, CAN, Modbus, custom) and many physical media (twisted pair wires, wireless, powerline, etc.).  During the last decade, we have developed a particularly deep and broad expertise in USB, both USB perpheral and embedded host designs.  As more devices that we designed were required to communicate with a desktop PC, we added desktop application software expertise (Visual Basic, C++, C#, .Net) and device driver expertise (Linux and Windows) to our capabilities.  With a staff of thirteen engineers and one technician, we have the breadth and depth of capability to provide systems design, as well as the ability to implement a wide range of technologies to our customers' product designs.

Another major shift we have seen since we started is the need for faster development schedules and more complex designs.  Both of these factors have led us to focus on project planning and management as an integral part of our services in order to manage multiple resources working in parallel on tight schedules and budgets.  

Faster develpment schedules and complex designs have driven us to investigate and implement designs using embedded Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS's) and state-machine firmware designs. We have done projects with Micrium's µC/OS-II, as well as with embedded Linux.  In order to meet the demands of more complex designs for computing speed and power, we have added FPGA, DSP and 32-bit microprocessor designs to our arsenal.

Finally, as the internet and other communication technologies have developed and improved, we have been able to implement tools and techniques that allow us to work collaboratively with remote customers and employees. At this point, our customers find us from all over the United States and we are beginning to see legitimate enquiries internationally. We also are able to support employees who are not located in Minneapolis, allowing us to draw from a much wider potential employee pool to provide us with the best talent available.