NODOMIC

Hardware / PCB Design

PCB Design

Schematic capture and board layout, from a first concept to a board that is actually manufacturable — and then assembled, powered up, measured and revised here, rather than handed off as a Gerber with fingers crossed.

What this covers

Why that last part matters

A layout is a hypothesis. It stops being one the first time you power the board.

Plenty of people can produce a compliant layout. The design rules pass, the netlist matches, the Gerbers export. What that does not tell you is whether the return path under the fast signal is intact, whether the regulator will be stable with the capacitor that was actually available, or whether the connector fouls the enclosure by half a millimetre.

Those things are discovered by building the board and measuring it. When layout, assembly, bring-up and fault-finding stay in the same hands, the correction lands in the next revision instead of in an email thread between three companies about whose fault it was.

A populated acquisition board held in tweezers, the controller at its centre, connector rows along two edges and the designer's name on the silkscreen
The layout, builtPlaced and reflowed here, down to 0.35 mm pitch. Test points and fiducials were part of the layout, not an afterthought.
The same board on a microscope stage during bring-up, a test probe touching one pad and a status LED lit, with a bodge wire and kapton tape from an earlier fix
The layout, testedA probe on the pad and the bodge wire from the last thing we got wrong. This is where a hypothesis becomes a design.

Boards we have designed and built

The acquisition PCB showing the ESP32-P4 controller and supporting circuitry
Acquisition boardESP32-P4, eight synchronized audio channels on a shared clock. Fine-pitch placement down to 0.35 mm.
A pair of clock and data distribution boards terminating in RJ45 jacks
Clock & data distributionDifferential LVDS over RJ45, validated across a 15 m link with zero data errors.
Microphone carrier boards laid out on the machined array plate before assembly
Microphone carriersSmall repeated boards designed to mount directly behind an acoustic aperture.

Three designs for our own sensing platform, each solving a different layout problem: dense fine-pitch placement around a capable controller, a differential link that has to stay clean over fifteen metres of ordinary cabling, and a small board repeated eight times whose mechanical position is part of the acoustic design. All were sourced, assembled and brought up here, and all have been through at least one revision driven by what the bench showed.

See what was measured with them →

What the work covers

Schematic capture

Circuit design with the part selection made alongside it, because a schematic drawn around components you cannot buy is a drawing, not a design.

Part selection and BOM

Chosen for availability, lifecycle and second sources as much as for datasheet performance — with the sourcing reality checked before the layout depends on it.

Layout

Placement and routing against the physics: return paths, controlled impedance where it matters, power integrity, thermal behaviour, and keeping sensitive analog away from the noisy parts.

Mixed-signal and fine pitch

Analog front ends next to digital switching, and packages down to 0.35 mm pitch placed and reflowed in-house.

Design for manufacture and test

Fiducials, test points, clearances and panelisation considered during layout, plus the access you will want when something needs probing later.

Mechanical fit

Board outline, connector positions and mounting developed together with the enclosure, so the two are not discovered to disagree after both are made.

How a board runs here

  1. 01

    Requirements and architecture

    What the board must do, under what constraints — power, size, environment, interfaces, cost.

  2. 02

    Schematic and parts

    Circuit and bill of materials developed together, availability checked as decisions are made rather than after.

  3. 03

    Layout and review

    Placement, routing, and a review pass against the physics as well as the design rules.

  4. 04

    Fabrication and assembly

    Boards ordered and populated in prototype quantities here, which keeps the loop between a decision and a physical result short.

  5. 05

    Bring-up and measurement

    Power up, prove each subsystem, then measure. Findings are written down, including the inconvenient ones.

  6. 06

    Revision

    A second spin informed by the bench. Boards that have never been revised have usually never been tested properly.

What we are not

Not a contract manufacturer: boards are assembled here in prototype quantities for development and testing, not at production volume. When a design is ready for series production we prepare the documentation for it and work with your manufacturer, rather than pretending to be one. We are also not a certification lab — we design with CE, FCC and EMC in mind and prepare for testing, which accredited third parties then carry out.

Related

3D CAD Design

Enclosures and mechanical parts modelled to the board.

Embedded Engineering

When the board needs firmware as well as layout — the whole system together.

Have a board that needs designing?

Bring the requirements, or an existing design that is not behaving. You get an honest read on approach, the risks visible from the outside, and whether we are the right people for it.

Discuss a project →