Electronic Product Design for Consumer Electronics

Audio and AV

Audio is analogue design done properly, and it is where a product feels cheap or premium long before anyone reads the spec. We design the signal path your product is judged on: amplification and class-D output stages, DAC and ADC front ends, microphone and voice capture, and the grounding and layout that keep the noise floor where it belongs. We design wireless audio and the AV interfaces your product needs, and we care about the details a listener notices, from pop and click suppression to latency, because those are what get written up in a review.

Connectivity and the connected home

A consumer connected product has to pair in seconds, work behind a home router, and behave when the network drops, all in a small plastic enclosure with a printed antenna and a tight bill of materials. We design and select across the current home stack, meaning Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Bluetooth LE and Wi-Fi, chosen for your product rather than for fashion, and we design the onboarding and reconnection behaviour that decides whether a customer keeps the product or returns it. The reliability comes from antenna design in the real enclosure, an honest link budget and coexistence in a crowded band, not from the protocol on the box.

Power, battery and USB-C

Power is where consumer products fail quietly: a battery life a third of the claim, a charger that runs hot, a product that browns out on a cheap supply. We design the power architecture, the battery and charging, and the USB-C and USB Power Delivery that customers now expect, and we model battery life against real use rather than arithmetic so the figure on the box survives contact with a customer. The common-charger rules and the coming requirement for user-replaceable batteries are design inputs we build in from the start, not retro-fits, because both reach back into your enclosure and your architecture.

Product security and compliance

The consumer compliance thicket is wider than it looks, and product security has moved from good practice to law. The UK PSTI regime was written for exactly your products, consumer connectable devices, and it requires unique credentials, a published vulnerability reporting route and a stated security update period. The EU Radio Equipment Directive cybersecurity rules and the Cyber Resilience Act add to that for connected products. We build the security in with one set of decisions rather than three retro-fits. Alongside it we design and scope the rest, from EMC and product safety to radio approval and the accessibility and repairability rules now reaching consumer products, and we get the route right at the start when it is cheap. Detail sits on our electronic product compliance page.

Design for volume

This is the discipline that separates a consumer product from a prototype, and it is where we take the most risk off you. A design that works on the bench is not a design you can build ten thousand of at a margin. We design for manufacture and for test from the architecture onwards: a bill of materials costed and second-sourced, tolerances that hold across a production run rather than on one hand-built board, test points and a production test strategy, and the design for manufacture decisions that decide your unit cost long before the factory sees it. The gap between a working prototype and a product ready for volume is where consumer programmes stall, and closing it is most of the job.

Across the consumer range

Every consumer product is built on the same electronics core: analogue and audio, connectivity, power, firmware and the discipline to build it at volume. That is our day-to-day work, and it applies whether the product is an audio or AV device, a connected home product, a lighting product or a leisure and entertainment device. What changes between them is the specific requirement sitting on top, from an audio performance target to a radio approval, and we scope that into the programme from the start, exactly as we scope the compliance route for any product.