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This was the early transition years for T. Engineering Associates (TEA). The founder Salvatore Tuzzo  had many discussions with colleagues about starting a research and development company that incorporates high quality conventional and unconventional solutions. The initial ideas and interests were many and by the mid seventies a sole proprietorship company was formed.  During the 70's I worked as a product design engineer and later a system design engineer, all the time spending my off hours developing the company.  We established contracts with several fortune 500 companies that lead to the formation of a specialized instrumentation interface group by the end of the seventies.  TEA developed several process systems to be used in the automated manufacturing test of single and multiple PCB instrument products.  The following years Sal  participated in the research and development of instrumentation for chemical identification.  Several custom interfaces for NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance), IR (Infrared, Near,Mid & Far) spectroscopy and GPLC (Gel Permeation Liquid Chromatography) instrumentation allowed TEA to be an established resource for high technology solutions. Contributions to a custom interface for NMR probe technology allowed Multi-Nuclei testing using a single probe was another success story.  This lead to the formation of  process control instrumentation and system development, addressing several chemical production and on-line testing solutions using COTS products and our own custom proprietary interfaces allowing manufacturers to obtain and maintain a competitive edge.

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This is a Data Acquisition plug in card for the Data General Nova® series computer family. It is a 16 inch square card that plugs into one of the I/O slots of the chassis.  It has 64 analog input channels and four DAC channels 12 bit resolution, 45,000 Samples per second. It was shipped with paper tape diagnostics and assembly language drivers. Both Data General and DEC computers had one great feature that made it great for scientific data collection and that was internal co-addition arbitration logic. What does that mean ? That means that you can retrieve data from an hardware DMA memory location and sum it to the data in the accumulator which was the current A/D conversion data, then store it back to  the sum to that selected DMA memory location, then increment the memory address counter.  All that with discrete logic chips as you can see on the card. A simple CPLD would do all of that and then some for a fraction of the cost. That was the basis of using and developing the FFT analyzer used in the NMR and IR system. Interesting enough the card sold in the $1400.00 range, typical of the higher speed cards today.

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Another product  line designed by Sal is the Micro Nova® Data Acquisition interface series. The first interface was a complete 32 channel analog input card with 2 DAC's on board.  The second was  an eight channel analog output DAC card. The standard resolution at the time was only 12 bits. This resolution seems to have held its own over the years as well. The Data General Micro Nova® used a bus controller chip to go from a 16" board with a 100 plus pins on two connectors, down to an 8 inch board with two small connectors. The I/O controller chip on the Micro-Nova is very similar to the PCI express 8b/10b protocol but over 100-times slower. This was the first attempt of reducing bust wires on the back plain that failed, due to the expensive cost of the chip.  Some software changes on the standard I/O communications were required , but in general the Micro-Nova® was software compatible and speed compatible with its big brother the Nova® and much smaller. During that time DEC came out with the LSI-11®, their micro PDP® line of computers that still used the BB-11 back plain but initiated the Q-Bus. I also worked on that design as well and when I find the pictures, I will post them. That was a card about the same size but still had the clumsy BB11 connector block.  The Micro-Nova® card sold in the $650.00 range and is typical of the medium speed cards today after 25 plus years.   TOP

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Sal continued to develop process control system products for the chemical processing and high-tech electronics industry. As founder Sal had the privilege to work and team up with some of the best scientists and engineers in the industry.  This was an exciting time and a great education as well. As a consortium of research and development engineers and scientists we were able to establish teams focused to handle the required multi-discipline challenges.  For a few years Sal developed an interest in Physical Vapor Deposition (PVD) and was awarded an contract to develop a control system for the coating of 36" mirrors. This was a personal interest for Sal  to  developed a few specialized PVD process control systems accurately control the deposition coating on very large mirrors used in telescopes.  After that Sal  took an interest in sonar and had the opportunity to perform receiver/transmitter designs working in the 3Khz sonar range up to the 300Khz acoustic transducer interfaces used in a variety of applications.  Custom contracts with companies like Polaroid®, White Consolidated®, Rockwell International®, Honeywell®, Dow®, Corning® and many others have been a great educational experience for Sal.  The TEA team has been very fortunate and grateful to have had these opportunities to design, develop and install process systems and instrumentation for several fortune 500 companies nation wide. By the end of the eighties, from the development of these larger systems, Sal began getting several inquiries for just the interface products alone that were used on the larger systems, hence, The Interface system area emerged.  Discussions about looking into developing interfaces and establishing this as a viable business venture began to develop.  After completing several custom interface contracts, and with the introduction of the IBM-PC Sal started to write several assembly language along with Fortran, Pascal, Basic and C programs for the custom and product line interfaces for the ISA, Microchannel, Vesa and other bus architectures. Our team established a market for developing peripheral interfaces for the PC market focusing on process control instrumentation applications. As founder Sal found his love for teaching surfacing again and from the completion of several peripheral designs he focused on developing teaching seminars.  Sal developed two seminars, Interfacing to the IBM-PC and "Data Acquisition & Process Control Using Personal Computers", which was successfully presented for several years to promote the PC into the Industrial process control arena.

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Additions to the company along with the combination of TEA and Educare Seminars all combined to form a new company, BASIL Networks™, which will focus on OEM product development and small single element embedded control development for low to high volume manufactures. The evolvement of higher density components has led Sal  to the development of putting more functions on a single interface peripheral.  The focus to develop higher speed data acquisition and control peripherals for manufacturing test was very successful.  BASIL Networks'  focus is on laboratory test and measurement services for custom OEM products focusing on DFM methodologies for high volume automated manufacturing test.   The business remains a multi-disciplined sole proprietorship company which still allows the flexibility required to develop the best team possible to address multi-discipline challenges.  Top

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BASIL Networks™ establishes a research and development division focusing on professional industrial education over the Internet using private network connections.  Focused areas of interest are Engineering, Development, Design for Manufacturing and Management.

Over the years we have been able to establish a task focusing philosophy which we have presented to many manages by example. From this task focused philosophy BASIL Networks allow students to contribute to the learning process by developing their own products and marketing them established marketing programs, while insuring that the students maintain ownership and profits of their products.  BASIL Networks seasoned resources in science, technology & business are the key to success for the young engineering student who wants to be different.  Limited resources has  delayed this on-going program and is still under development with additions being added during the new product development cycles at BASIL Networks. We would like to present this philosophy both on-line and at selected location seminar workshops, encouraging young and seasoned engineers, scientists and managers to see the benefits and profits from attending.

In 2003 BASIL Networks™ started to investigate the security issues connected with Identity theft and network security breaches.  This is by far the most difficult problem to solve. The span of issues not only cover legacy technology still active along with all variations up to the current technology. These security breaches also cover social computing behavior that allows security breaches. Some of the best security encryptions technology has been breached and broken because of poor security human behavior.  With this in mind we have been researching a model to eliminate several of the variables out of the complex equation to increase the level of security in communications.

One of the areas that Sal researched was the security of the wireless communications arena. With the increased use of wireless TCP/IP security was very weak. Sal started investigating modulation technology that could be used to secure TCP/IP wireless communications. The problem existed of how do we test something like this since the equipment available was very expensive and was limited to standard type modulation schemes and did not  allow us to test the new modulation schemes Sal developed. .  From the unconventional modulation schemes, Sal developed the PMG-130  a Programmable Modulation Generator series based on the Analog Device Quadrature DDS chip with the addition of a control CPLD that allows programmability of standard and unconventional modulation schemes to be developed and tested.  From the completion of the PMG-130 came the next generation of the PMG series, the PMG-M-130, a multi-channel system used to research new modulation technologies for wireless communication.

Sal has a long development list of products that are both medium and high volume to work on. Some are being funded internally. The internally funded products are open to manufacturers that want to add to their product line. Just contact Sal through our contact page.

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