Embedded Product Development for Marine & Offshore

A marine electronics warranty return rarely shows a flooded enclosure. It shows green dendrites under the conformal coat, a connector backed out by genset vibration, or an input stage punched through by a thruster's switching transient. GizanTech treats the vessel itself as the test spec: every enclosure, gland, connector and front end is dimensioned against IEC 60945 and the corrosion-fatigue-transient reality of mast, deck and offshore-platform service before a single board is cut.

Challenges specific to Marine & Offshore

• Salt-mist seeds dendrites the lid never explains

  A conductive marine aerosol wicks past gland threads and conformal-coat pinholes, plating dendrites across fine-pitch leads and eroding tin-plated contacts long before the enclosure shows any visible leak, so corrosion-driven shorts look like random field failures.

• Shaft, genset and wave slam fatigue the assembly

  Propeller-shaft harmonics and diesel-genset vibration run continuously while wave-slam shock arrives as impulses; together they crack leadless solder fillets, fracture tall ceramic parts, and walk unlatched connectors out of their housings across a single season.

• Winch and thruster switching wreck the 24 V bus

  Inductive deck loads dump load-dump spikes and ring onto the vessel DC bus far beyond any bench supply envelope; an input front end sized only for nominal 24 V is silently destroyed the first time a bilge pump or thruster contactor opens nearby.

• Deck sun to night cold-soak drifts the design

  One mast unit bakes near its junction limit under tropical sun and then cold-soaks below freezing on a North Sea watch; commercial-grade parts chosen at a 25 C reference brown out, lose timing margin, or crack solder when forced to both extremes daily.

• Ingress arrives through the cable entry, not the seam

  Diurnal thermal cycling makes a sealed box breathe, drawing humid salt air through the weakest gland or vent until it condenses on live copper; the actual ingress path is the connector boot and pressure imbalance, which an IP rating on the lid never describes.

• Type approval gets bolted on after design freeze

  Bridge VHF, AIS and radar crowd the same RF band, so a unit that ignored IEC 60945 conducted and radiated limits desensitizes the vessel's own receivers and is rejected by the class society after layout, tooling and BOM are already locked.

How GizanTech solves them

1. Marine corrosion stack down to the contact. Contacts move to ENIG or gold-flash on sealed shells, critical nets get potted under Parylene rather than a single spray coat, and exposed hardware becomes 316 stainless or anodized; the build is then proven on IEC 60068-2-52 salt-mist and the IEC 60945 corrosion clause.
2. Fatigue-first mechanical hardening. Tall and heavy parts are staked and underfilled, board-to-board joints move to positive-lock circular connectors, and the carrier is isolated or hard-mounted per the install; survival is demonstrated against IEC 60068-2-6 random vibration and 2-27 shock inside the IEC 60945 envelope.
3. DC bus survivability front end. Every supply input gets a coordinated load-dump TVS, common-mode choke, and reverse-polarity block sized for inductive deck switching, then verified on IEC 61000-4-5 surge and the IEC 60945 supply-variation profile so winch and thruster events stop at the connector, not the MCU.
4. Two-extreme thermal budgeting. Parts are chosen at AEC/industrial grade with explicit junction-temperature headroom modelled across the deck-sun-to-cold-soak band, then held through IEC 60945 dry-heat, damp-heat and low-temperature soaks so the unit keeps spec at both ends of the same day.
5. Sealing engineered at the ingress path. The seal is designed where water actually enters: marine glands sized to cable OD, individually sealed conductors, gasketed seams, and a hydrophobic pressure-equalizing vent so day-night breathing cannot pull aerosol inside, all confirmed by IP67/IP68 immersion per IEC 60529.
6. Class-society EMC readiness. Shielded layout, filtered I/O and a low-impedance chassis ground are dimensioned to IEC 60945 conducted and radiated limits, with a pre-compliance scan before freeze, so the DNV or ABS type-approval session confirms the design rather than reopening it.