Hardware Design and Development Services

The first step needed in the process of the hardware product life cycle is the idea phase.

Usually, the customer comes up with an idea fitting their marketing road map or filling a gap in the market.

If needed, we have the expertise to support the customer with the use case study and with the definition of the preliminary technical requirements.

Our team checks if we have all the system competencies to continue into the concept phase and prepares additional inputs for the next stage.

The concept phase is the most important and often neglected one in product design.

It takes experience to hold back and not jump straight into coding or schematics design.

Our team comes with a technical concept – one or more possible ones – that fits the marketing idea and use cases. We carry out an analysis of what technologies suit the product best and how they can be combined.

In some cases, an experimental Proof of Concept (POC) can be created to decide which concept candidate has the highest chance to succeed in the technical way.

The output of the design phase is the delivery of manufacturing data.

We create a functional block of the system and organize design parts – e.g., electronics design, embedded software design, mechanical design.

We continue with the detailed implementation of each part for the prototypes. A part of this phase is also preliminary manufacturability cross-check with a potential production site (either our external partner or that one located in the customer’s premises).

Finally, we make reviews of the prototype manufacturing data.

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Consilia provides production data, procurement, testing, and prototype certification.

Our procurement team orders production of prototypes.

Our team typically addresses our external supplier – or contacts the production on customers’ premises if agreed so.

Procurement is based on production data – BOMs for components, Gerber/ODB data for PCB, assembly data for assembly house, and test plan for finalization site. As soon as we get the prototypes, we make a basic bring-up and proceed with their characterization.

Throughout the design, we do our best to select components with a long expected lifetime and ARE confirmed to be available on the market for the planned lifetime of the product. The last activity is the certification of the prototypes – we either do that on our own (based on the standards defined by the customer) or at least, we support the customer with all the troubleshooting related to the certification process.

Correct Production Data is the Basis for reliable and efficient Manufacturing.

Our team shares the production data with the series production site.

We usually assist with the testing of the zero-series, and we can also develop the production test fixtures and test software.

In the case of complex market-challenging products, we also support our customers personally on their production site to train the production team for optimized yield.

We feel responsible for the developed products.

Throughout the design, we do our best to select components with a long expected lifetime and are confirmed to be available on the market for the planned lifetime of the product.

During the life of every product, it happens that some components get EOL (end-of-life) status. We are ready and competent to exchange the EOL components for new alternatives (sometimes recommended by the chip producer, in other cases, we need to search on our own).

And our hardware engineers verify the redesigns if appropriate.