Electronic Hardware Design Development

Professional electronic hardware design for product teams who need to get it right and need to get it done.

At Ignys, we design electronic hardware for products where those stakes are real. We work with Technical Directors, Product Development Managers, R&D Managers, and Innovation Leads inside businesses that understand the challenge they’re facing but need specialist hardware engineers to lead it, structure it, and deliver it with the certainty their stakeholders expect.

We’re not a consultancy with layers of overhead. We’re not a single contractor trying to cover too much ground. We’re a specialist embedded and hardware electronics team with the depth, the process, and the commercial awareness to be genuinely useful when the pressure is on.

What We Mean by Electronic Hardware Design

Electronic hardware design is the process of turning a product requirement into a working, manufacturable, certifiable set of electronics. It encompasses every engineering decision between “here’s what this product needs to do” and “here’s a board that does it reliably”.

That’s a wider scope than most people assume. PCB layout, placing components and routing tracks on boards, yes, that is one part of it. But the decisions that most affect whether a hardware programme succeeds are made before layout begins and often don’t appear on a schematic at all.

Done properly, electronic hardware design covers:

• Requirements analysis and technical specification — translating product requirements into hardware architecture, identifying risks early, and establishing a design approach before any engineering time is spent
• Breadboarding, simulation and prototyping — ensuring circuit performance is correct from the start and major unknowns are addressed before the first PCB is laid out
• Schematic capture and circuit design — the detailed electrical design of your product, documented in a reviewable, transferable format
• Analogue and mixed-signal design — sensor interfaces, signal conditioning, filtering, and precision measurement circuits that require a different discipline to purely digital design
• Power supply and power electronics design — voltage regulation, battery management, power sequencing, protection circuits, and efficiency optimisation
• Microcontroller and processor selection — choosing the right silicon for your application, balancing capability, cost, availability, and the firmware roadmap
• RF and wireless hardware design — antenna design, RF matching networks, radio module integration, and co-existence between wireless standards
• PCB design — layer stack, component placement, signal routing, EMC management, thermal design, and design for manufacture
• Component selection and BOM management — choosing parts with an eye on availability, cost, longevity, and supply chain risk
• Hardware prototyping and bring-up — building the first boards, systematically validating the design, and resolving the issues that prototypes always surface
• Compliance and certification support — designing for CE/UKCA marking, EMC and LVD requirements, and other product safety standards from the outset

Each of these is a hardware electronics design discipline. Weaknesses in any one of them have a habit of surfacing at the worst possible moment.

Circuit Design and Schematic Capture

The schematic is the foundation of every hardware programme. It documents the design, how every component connects, and what every circuit is supposed to do. A schematic should tell a story to the engineer, with all relevant information available at a glance. Poorly structured, inadequately reviewed, or rushed schematics are one of the most reliable predictors of problems later in a programme.

Our engineers approach schematic capture as a design activity, not an administrative one. We make the circuit work on paper before we make it work on a board. We review architecture, check operating conditions, simulate critical sections where uncertainty warrants it, and document decisions so that your design is understandable and maintainable by anyone who works on it in future.

If you have an existing schematic that you need reviewed, we can do that too. Many of the project recoveries we get involved in begin with a schematic review that finds the root cause of problems that have been expensive to try and diagnose.

Analogue and Mixed-Signal Design

Analogue circuit design is one of the areas where the gap between generalist and specialist is most consequential. Digital systems mostly either work or they don’t; analogue systems degrade. Noise, drift, impedance mismatches, ground loops, and component tolerances all affect performance in ways that don’t always surface during initial testing but become visible in production, in the field, or at compliance.

Our engineers have practical experience in the analogue disciplines that modern embedded products typically require: precision measurement and signal conditioning for sensors, low-noise amplifier design, ADC and DAC interface circuits, current sensing, and the careful partitioning of analogue and digital sections on mixed-signal boards.

If your product measures something (temperature, pressure, current, position, load), has an audio component, or extracts a small signal in the presence of noise, the analogue front-end design is where the accuracy and reliability of that measurement is determined. It deserves more attention than it often gets.

Power Supply and Power Electronics Design

Power electronics is rarely glamorous, and it’s almost always underestimated. The power supply is involved in every function of your product. Mistakes in power architecture, wrong topology selection, insufficient decoupling, poor thermal design or inadequate protection tend to create problems that are time-consuming to diagnose and expensive to fix on a built board. Some power supply problems are obvious when there is a bang or a release of the infamous blue smoke; others manifest as reliability problems from overheating, ringing or overshooting voltage specifications, instabilities from transient input or load switches, and more.

We design power electronics for a wide range of product requirements, including:

• DC-DC conversion — buck, boost, buck-boost, and SEPIC topologies for efficient voltage regulation
• Linear regulation — where noise performance, simplicity, or form factor requirements make it the right choice
• Battery management — charging, protection, fuel gauging, and cell balancing for rechargeable battery systems
• Power sequencing — managing the order which rails come up and down in multi-rail systems to prevent damage and degradation over time
• Protection circuits — over-voltage, over-current, reverse polarity, and ESD protection
• Low-power design — minimising idle and sleep-mode consumption for battery-powered and energy-harvesting applications
• Mains-connected design — isolated power supplies and safety considerations for products operating at line voltage

Power design decisions made early in a project are much cheaper to change than power problems discovered at compliance testing or in volume manufacturing.

RF and Wireless Hardware Design

Wireless connectivity is now a requirement in a wide range of commercial products: IoT devices, industrial sensors, consumer electronics, and more. RF hardware design is one of the most specialised areas in electronics, and one of the most frequently underestimated by product teams integrating wireless for the first time.

Using a certified radio module doesn’t eliminate RF design work; it moves it. Antenna placement, ground plane geometry, RF trace routing, and the interaction between the radio and the rest of your electronics all affect wireless performance in ways that don’t show up until you’re in a compliance chamber or, worse, in the field.

Our hardware engineers have experience with:

• Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and Bluetooth Classic hardware integration
• Wi-Fi hardware design and antenna placement
• Sub-GHz RF design including 433 MHz, 868 MHz, and 915 MHz ISM bands
• LoRa, Zigbee and Thread
• Cellular module integration (LTE-M, NB-IoT, LTE Cat-1)
• GNSS and GPS hardware integration
• RF antenna design and placement optimisation
• Co-existence design for products with multiple radio technologies

We work with module-based designs where they are appropriate, and with discrete RF front-end design where the application demands it.

Component Selection and Supply Chain Awareness

The component decisions made during hardware design have consequences that extend well beyond the initial programme. A component that is difficult to source, rapidly approaching end-of-life, available from only one distributor, or priced at prototype quantities without checking production pricing is a problem waiting to emerge, often at the worst possible time.

Our engineers factor supply chain considerations into component selection from the start. We check availability and lead times during design, not after. We consider second-source options for critical parts. We flag components with known longevity concerns. And we help you build a Bill of Materials (BOM) that your manufacturing partner can procure at the volumes and timescales your business plan requires.

Hardware Prototyping and Board Bring-Up

The transition from schematic to working hardware is where hardware projects most commonly stall. First-spin prototypes almost always surface issues: some minor, some significant. The speed and cost with which those issues are resolved depends heavily on how the bring-up process is approached.

Our engineers support hardware bring-up as a structured engineering activity: visual checks, systematic power-on sequencing, signal verification, firmware co-development, fault diagnosis, and design iteration. We document what we find and why we change it, so that the learning from every prototype spin is captured and the design gets progressively more robust with each iteration. We aim to do each PCB in one spin, and have enough experience to handle a second if needed.

We also work with development boards and evaluation kits to accelerate early firmware development in parallel with hardware design, reducing the period between “schematic agreed” and “firmware running on real hardware.”

EMC Design and CE/UKCA Compliance

Electromagnetic compatibility is one of the areas where the cost of not thinking about it early is highest. EMC failures at formal testing, or at a customer’s site after shipment, are expensive, disruptive, and almost always trace back to design decisions that could have been made differently if compliance had been part of the brief from the start.

We treat EMC as a design discipline throughout the hardware development process: careful partitioning of noisy and sensitive circuits, controlled return current paths, appropriate filtering at power and signal interfaces, and PCB layout decisions that support compliance rather than fight it. By the time your product reaches pre-compliance testing, it should already be engineered for it.

Our experience covers CE marking (EMC Directive, Low Voltage Directive and Radio Equipment Directive), UKCA marking for the UK market, and forward-looking compliance with the EU Cyber Resilience Act. We can support you through the process of preparing technical files and working with accredited test laboratories. If you’re planning a global rollout, we can cover FCC for the US market and ISED for Canada too.

Electronic Hardware Redesign and Recovery

Not every engagement starts from a blank canvas. Some of the most commercially critical hardware work we do involves products that are already in existence but need to change. Possibly because a key component has been discontinued, or a design issue has been traced back to hardware rather than firmware. Sometimes a product is failing in the field in ways that weren’t caught during development; sometimes a manufacturer has identified an assembly problem that points back to the PCB.

Common hardware redesign scenarios we support:

• Component obsolescence and end-of-life migration — replacing discontinued components with compatible alternatives, often alongside schematic changes and PCB re-spins
• Chip shortage redesigns — redesigning around alternative silicon where preferred parts are unavailable or have unacceptable lead times
• Design rescue and fault diagnosis — systematic root cause analysis of hardware problems, followed by a structured design correction
• Production issue resolution — identifying and correcting design factors contributing to assembly failures, yield problems, or field returns
• Performance improvement re-spins — taking a product that works but has known limitations and systematically addressing them ahead of the next production build
• Regulatory compliance retrofit — redesigning to achieve CE/UKCA certification for a product that was not designed with compliance in mind from the start

If you’ve inherited a hardware problem, the first step is a clear-eyed technical assessment, not a commitment to a solution before the problem is properly understood. That’s how we start.

Our Design Tooling

We work in Altium Designer as our primary PCB design environment, giving us full schematic-to-layout integration, 3D board visualisation, and clean manufacturing handover. We also use industry-standard simulation tools for circuit analysis and signal integrity verification.

All design outputs are fully documented and provided to you in the format your manufacturing and production partners require: schematics, Gerber files, ODB++, BOM, assembly drawings, and test specifications.

Your design IP is yours. Our commercial model is straightforward: you commission the work, we deliver the output, you own it.

What We Offer

• Electronic hardware architecture and technical specification
• Schematic capture and circuit design
• Analogue and mixed-signal circuit design
• Power supply and power electronics design
• Battery management and low-power hardware design
• RF and wireless hardware design
• Microcontroller and processor selection
• FPGA design and integration
• Component selection and BOM development
• Supply chain risk assessment
• Multilayer PCB design and layout
• High-speed PCB design and signal integrity
• EMC design and pre-compliance support
• CE marking and UKCA compliance support
• Hardware prototyping and board bring-up
• Hardware design review and technical audit
• Component obsolescence and redesign
• Design rescue and fault diagnosis
• Full design handover with manufacturing outputs

Hardware Electronics Design Frequently Asked Questions