Most IoT projects do not fail because the idea was wrong. They fail in the gap between a working prototype and a device that can be built, certified, installed and supported by the hundred or the thousand. This article walks through how that gap is crossed in a product design project, and calls out the decisions that are expensive to reverse. The stages of an IoT product design project Requirements and constraints. Start with the environment and the economics: where the devic

Every hardware team with more projects than schematic engineers eventually asks the same question: can an AI tool actually take real work off a PCB designer's plate, or does it just create a new category of work — reviewing what the AI got wrong? The honest answer, after running a handful of these tools against real board work rather than a vendor's demo project, is: it depends entirely on which part of the workflow you point it at. Some parts speed up. Others get worse, not

The pitch for AI-assisted PCB design tools is built almost entirely around boards of a certain size — enough real estate for the tool's training data to have seen comparable layouts, enough component spacing for its constraint-solving to have real room to work with. Most of the marketing demos reinforce this: a mid-sized development board, a reasonably generous four-layer stack, components with normal spacing. Push the same tools toward a small board — the kind where every sq

Here's the rule: a PCB fab quote is only as accurate as the manufacturing detail behind it, and every detail left implicit in a quote request gets filled in by the fab's default assumptions — which are frequently more conservative, and more expensive, than what the actual design needs. A quote that comes back higher than expected is very often not the fab overcharging; it's the fab correctly pricing a worst-case interpretation of a spec that was never fully specified. The Rul

The Most Expensive Blind Spot in Embedded Engineering There is a skill gap in embedded engineering that nobody talks about loudly, but everybody who has shipped real hardware products has encountered. It sits at the boundary between firmware and hardware. It is not about writing better drivers, not about mastering RTOS scheduling, and not about optimising power consumption in software. It is about understanding what happens to a signal before it reaches the microcontroller's

Reading Time: 25 mins Topic: Product Management & Execution Bridging the gap between academic projects and industry reality. Visualizing Frustrated engineer looking at a circuit board. Photo via Unsplash. The Hook: The 9-Month Illusion "We'll have prototypes in three months, beta in six, and we'll be shipping volume by Q4." If you've been in the hardware industry for more than a week, you just chuckled. Or maybe you winced. The reality of hardware product development is that

Reading Time: 25 mins Topic: Engineering Mindset & Productization Bridging the gap between academic projects and industry reality. Indian engineering student soldering a PCB at a cluttered desk The Hook: The Great Indian Engineering Paradox India produces over 1.5 million engineering graduates every year. We have the drive, the mathematical foundation, and the hustle. Yet, ask any hiring manager at a top hardware or embedded systems company, and you'll hear the same frustrati

Reading Time: 25-30 mins Topic: RF Engineering & Antenna Design The depth of engineering is measured in impedance. Photo via Unsplash. In a typical embedded systems project, the "Radio" is often treated as a black box. You buy a module (like an ESP32 or a Nordic nRF52), connect an antenna, and expect it to work. If you're using a PCB trace antenna, you might copy-paste the reference design from the datasheet and hope for the best. But here is the industry reality: Antenna des

When a rocket launches, everyone watches. But once the dust settles and a satellite begins its life in orbit, the most important engineering challenge quietly begins: Can it talk to Earth? Satellites don’t survive because they’re in space — they survive because they stay in contact. Commands from ground Telemetry from orbit Payload data downlinks Emergency beacons One faulty antenna, one miscalculated link budget — and a multi-crore mission becomes a silent piece of metal cir

In modern electronics, performance limits no longer come from silicon speed — they come from packaging. As processors, power modules, and RF front-ends shrink, thermal density rises, parasitic effects grow, and mechanical reliability margins collapse.A PCB alone is no longer enough. Today’s real-world systems — EV power modules, industrial controllers, AI accelerators, and satellite electronics — depend on advanced packaging and assembly design to survive. For decades, this f

By Srihari M, Director Product Development at EurthTech Published on March 18, 2025 With the Discovery Phase complete and a Proof of Concept (PoC) validated, the next step in product development is the Concept Refinement Phase. This stage focuses on optimizing the product’s design to enhance usability, manufacturability, and overall user experience before transitioning to full-scale engineering. A well-executed Concept Refinement phase ensures that: The product is aesthetical