One team for the full board lifecycle
High-speed PCB design for AI hardware, board and Linux bring-up, EMI pre-compliance, and hardware testing in CI. Four stages that usually mean four vendors and three handoffs.
BenchPod typical CI: emulate sensors and power rails by playing arbitrary analog waveforms into your target.
What we do
Four stages of the board lifecycle, one team
Integrating AI hardware — NPUs, accelerator modules and SoMs — is our specialty.
01
High-speed PCB design
Schematic, stackup and layout for boards that carry AI silicon: NPUs, accelerator modules and SoMs.
02
Bring-up and Linux BSP
First power-on through to a booting system: bootloader, device tree, drivers and a reproducible image.
03
EMI / EMC pre-compliance
Find the emissions problems on the bench, while a fix is still a layout change rather than a respin.
04
Test, CI and iteration
Hardware-in-the-loop tests wired into your pipeline, so every change is measured on the real board.
Founders with more than 20 years in Linux, CI, CD and reliability engineering. Two decades of established software practice, brought to hardware.
Best practices that get skipped
None of it is controversial. It is just the first thing cut when a date slips.
What usually happens
- The layout house does not talk to the firmware team.
- Bring-up findings live in a notebook and are never measured again.
- EMC is discovered at the accredited lab, after the layout is frozen.
- CI stops at “it compiles.” The hardware regressions ship.
How we work instead
- Design-for-test and EMC are schematic review inputs, before layout is frozen.
- Bring-up becomes the first automated suite, and the baseline to regress against.
- Pre-scans happen on the bench, months before the lab.
- Every commit is flashed, booted and measured on the real board.
How we engage
Three ways to work with us
Take the full lifecycle, or bring us in for the stage that is blocking you.
The whole board
All four stages, from a blank schematic to a board under test in CI.
A single stage
A layout review, a Linux BSP, an EMC pre-scan, or the test rig on its own.
Rescue an in-flight project
A board that will not boot, will not pass EMC, or will not stay fixed.
Our test hardware
BenchPod
We built BenchPod because we kept rebuilding the same test rig from a Raspberry Pi and assorted adapters. It is not a prerequisite for working with us, and nothing we build for you depends on it.
Resources
Technical write-ups from our own work
Building a solar panel simulator
A bench supply cannot stand in for a solar panel. A closed-loop emulator with a real I-V curve, and what the knee looks like on hardware.
Read it →
Power sequencing and brown-out testing
Gating the target through protected eFuses, monitoring current per rail, and sagging the supply on purpose.
Read it →
Build your own HIL, or buy a pod?
Where the Pi-and-relays path leads, and when it is genuinely the right call.
Read it →
Where are you starting from?
A blank schematic, a board back from the fab, or a pipeline that stops at the build step. The first conversation is the same: what are you shipping, and how do you know it works?