Independent PCB design, hardware design review and embedded firmware for teams building electronic products. Over 15 years of designs in production — from medical imaging to connected consumer products and industrial. Whether you are about to manufacture your prototype, transition to production or just starting with electronics design, an independent review can save you expensive respins and months of delays.
The pattern I keep seeing
These are real problems I have found on real client boards — most of them already in production, patched with add-ons instead of fixed at the source.
Ferrite beads scattered across the schematic as a general-purpose EMC remedy — and a pre-compliance scan that fails anyway.
Return paths and ground planes that were never planned, so the board radiates and nobody can explain where it comes from.
A fine-pitch micro-BGA dropped into a large, otherwise relaxed board — pushing up layer count, fab class and assembly cost for the whole design.
A stackup specified out of habit rather than need — paying every unit, forever, for layers and materials the design never uses.
Mismatched logic levels, protection circuits that protect nothing, and ICs powering up through a pull-up resistor when their rail is supposed to be down.
Yield falling for reasons that were designed in: footprints, thermal relief, panelisation and test access decided late, or not at all.
Every one of these is cheap to catch in a review and expensive to discover after the first build — in respins, in certification retests, in units that fail at the line.
Services
Most engagements start with a review, because it is the fastest way for both of us to find out whether I can help.
A structured review of schematic, layout and stackup before you commit to a build — or a diagnosis of a board that is already misbehaving in the field.
From requirements to a manufacturable board: schematic capture, high-density and high-speed layout, stackup definition, EMC-aware design, BOM and manufacturability, then bring-up and debug of the first articles.
Zephyr RTOS on Nordic and NXP targets. Driver and module architecture with explicit responsibilities and interfaces; security handled deliberately — key storage, secure boot, protection of user data on the target; and unit tests, simulation and CI pipelines so firmware quality stops being a matter of opinion.
System architecture
Choosing a processor is not a question of clock speed and peripheral lists. It is toolchain maturity, RTOS support, driver quality, documentation your team can actually read, vendor longevity, and the engineering hours you will spend working around whatever is missing.
I have watched a cheap, genuinely powerful part become the most expensive line on a project once development time was counted honestly. That cost never appears on the BOM.
I help define or review system architecture across hardware, firmware and user experience, against the constraints that actually bind: BOM cost, power budget, form factor, certification path, and engineering effort.
Background
Led the electronics design of a portable ultrasound system: every PCB, including three FPGAs and the high-speed interfaces between them, plus collaborating with Verilog and firmware works. Patent US10548565B2.
Ramón Salas Edwards award, Colegio de Ingenieros de Chile, 2016. Selected by CORFO for commercialisation training with SRI International.
Master of Engineering, University of Melbourne. Created and taught a PCB design course at Pontificia Universidad Católica; lectured computer architecture at Universidad de Chile; tutored digital systems design (FPGA and Verilog) at the University of Melbourne; and runs the RodriTech YouTube channel to share eduactional videos and his own projects.
How it works
A short email describing the product and the symptom. No charge, no obligation, and happy to sign an NDA before you send anything.
Schematic and layout — source files or PDFs — plus stackup, BOM, and any test or certification results you already have.
A written report ranked by severity, with a concrete fix for each issue, followed by a call with whoever needs to act on it.
I work from Chile and keep Australian business hours, so a normal working day overlaps yours in full. Most of my recent work has been delivered remotely to Australian teams.
Contact
If something on this page described your product, a short email is the fastest way to find out whether I can help. I answer every enquiry personally.
info@smartdreams.cl