Welcome to Dawn VME Products, a time proven supplier of quality and performance technology based commercial, COTS, and military products used within the embedded and real time computer markets. Dawn is classified as a Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business and serves a wide range of customers and applications in markets such as military, aerospace, space, defense, homeland security, medical, telecommunications, research, entertainment and others.
The multi-talented team at Dawn provides customers an in-depth and broad range of system and product knowledge and expertise coupled with the latest tools in design and manufacture to enable fast turn-around, competitively priced, quality design, manufacturing and support of a wide range of custom requirements along with a continual development of new standard product technology.
Our comprehensive quality system allows us to work across the multiple markets served and meet the stringent quality requirements of our customers.
Dawn’s products today range from simple commercial grade, convection cooled, sheet metal/extrusion based packaging designs to complex military, conduction-cooled, rugged air transport rack (ATR) systems. Most products today contain some form of Dawn’s exclusive internet enabled, microprocessor based I/O monitoring and control technology called RuSH™.
The early days of Dawn
Dawn was founded February 19, 1985, a little over 4 years after the VMEbus architecture was announced to the world. Prior to founding Dawn, I was involved with product development and manufacture of various CPU’s, memory’s, Graphics controllers, and backplanes for VMEbus and MULTIbus and was an original member of the “VME bus Standards Committee”, a group of technologists prior to VITA™, that authored, edited, and readied for IEEE approval the first release of the VME specification.
Being an engineer and having a product development background, my goal in founding Dawn was to produce a line of products and system tools that would make it easy for engineers to create high performance and reliable systems. The mottos I established at founding of Dawn were “Designed by engineers for engineers” and “Quality and Performance Products at Competitive Prices.”
Dawn became the technological leader in backplanes in 1985 when it invented and brought to market the concepts and the design for “balanced and matched” impedance backplanes and introduced for the very first time, a wide range of products based on this exceptional high performance technology.
This new technology allowed Dawn to produce products for the industry that greatly exceeded the performance of then available competitors’ products and the performance required by the VMEbus specification. This exceptional performance resulted in substantial system reliability and system margins.
In order to demonstrate and prove the performance of Dawn’s products over competitors to customers, Dawn invented, patented, and brought to market a “Board Assembly For Validation and Characterization Of A Bus System” This product provided a way for customers to empirically measure and prove the signal and power distribution performance in backplanes by generating and receiving signals across the backplane at various speeds many times faster than required and by generating a power and heat load to validate margins and cooling on a slot by slot basis.
Dawn quickly became the backplane vendor of choice of many OEM’s and market share grew as Dawn developed a comprehensive range of backplane types and sizes that far exceeded product offering of competitors and carried them in stock for short lead time delivery.
Dawn Over the Years
Over the years, Dawn has achieved my goals I established at founding by inventing and bringing to market a number of products that made system design and construction an easier task for engineers. All products have been quality and performance driven. Dawn’s long term membership with PICMG® and VITA™ and participation on various standards committees has allowed Dawn to offer the latest in technology and design to our customers.
A significant part of our business over the years has been customer specific design and custom product manufacture. To provide the best support possible, Dawn has invested in the latest CAD Design tools in 3D modeling, thermal analysis and PWB design that when coupled with our experience and expertise, allows Dawn to create new customer designs and manufacture products in the least amount of time and at the lowest cost.
It is amazing for me to look back over the years and realize the numerous prestigious, high-profile programs that Dawn was selected to participate in. It is a true testimony of customer faith, acceptance and confidence in the team at Dawn.
Dawn Today
Today, Dawn stocks one of the widest ranges of standard commercial off the shelf (COTS) products available from any manufacturer. This allows engineers to quickly get their program or project off the ground and running with the latest in technology. Our products span the full spectrum of CompactPCI® and VMEbus technology from protoboards to complete packaging systems. Check out our website. If you don’t find what you are looking for exactly, give us a call and we probably can provide it for you.
We are located in a modern 42,000 square foot R&D facility which we own, with lots of room for expansion.
We offer a full range of design services and manufacturing using the latest CAD tools. Dawn uses SolidWorks™ and FlowWorks™ for 3D Modeling, mechanical design, and Thermal Analysis. We are also able to design in AutoCAD. Altium™ is used for printed circuit board design. We routinely turn product designs to manufactured products in time frames that span a few days to a few weeks.
A few years ago, in the interest to create greater reliability and system uptime, Dawn recognized the need to incorporate system health monitoring and control of the systems it designed and sold. This led to the development of the Dawn RuSH™ line of products. This amazing technology consists of an extremely flexible microprocessor based I/O controller and function/feature list developed over 5 years’ worth of products and programs. Today, RuSH™ technology is installed in numerous military and commercial programs. No competitor has developed anything close and in fact, we sell this technology to several of our competitors. This technology adds tremendous value relative to its cost and is internet enabled.
If this is your first look at Dawn, and you are trying to decide who to trust your business to, you can rest assured you will get a quality and performance product from Dawn at a fair price. It will also be delivered to you on-time. If you are an established customer, then you already know the reputation and corporate image Dawn has built over the years. If you are in the area, give us a call and stop by to see our facility. We would welcome your visit and love to see you.
Sincerely,
Barry Burnsides
CEO
