Case Studies
Written at property level: challenge, architecture, contribution, what consumed the schedule, and outcome. Customer names and implementation internals are not disclosed, and the omissions are deliberate rather than vague. Where a competitor’s case study puts a testimonial, these put the engineering that was hard — which is what a reader in the same position is actually looking for.
RF rectification, analog power management and ultra-low-power digital on one die. Cold start is a circular dependency: before the storage element holds charge there is not enough voltage to run the circuits that manage charging.
Hardware-anchored identity, a verified boot chain and cryptographic integration completing inside the power a contactless field supplies — across the range of positions a card is actually presented at.
A demanding filtering, synchronisation and error-correction chain closed inside the budgeted device. Above eighty per cent utilisation, timing closure stops being a tool problem and becomes an architecture problem.
Dependency removal, reset architecture, DFT insertion and verification equivalence through to tapeout. The function was never in doubt; the work was in the assumptions the FPGA had been quietly satisfying.
An inspection cell that had to reach a verdict, drive a reject and attach the result to a batch record, all inside a cycle time the line would not extend. The model was the smallest part of the work.
Goods tracked across mountains, ocean and air on one multi-mode device — cellular, satellite NTN and a sub-GHz item mesh on the Sony Altair ALT1350, with custody signed in silicon so it holds where no ground network reaches.
A large Artix-7, DDR3, gigabit Ethernet and roughly 250 user I/O on one board — where the 1156-ball BGA breakout sets the layer count and a sequenced power tree from a single 5 V input decides whether it powers up at all. Designed, built and brought up in-house.
Cosmetic and structural defects on a high-volume pre-rolled cone — a contamination speck, a malformed tip, a loose filter fold, an out-of-round base — fed, imaged, sorted, verified and packed as one automated line.
Two failure classes, two physical principles: full six-face laser geometry inspection for external faults, and an ML-classified acoustic resonance test that knocks each brick to find the internal voids and cracks a camera cannot see.
Automating a high-volume true-wireless earbud line where the worst faults — a reversed magnet, a wrong-way battery, adhesive on a microphone — vanish once the shell is sealed, so inspection is distributed to every step and each matched pair is tested and traced to pack.
Digital fails with an error; analog just gets worse. On a mixed-signal SoC the danger is not a crash but a quiet loss of margin — coupling, substrate noise, supply sag &mdash…
The radio is the part everyone pictures; the timing is the part that decides whether it works. An O-RAN radio unit lives or dies on fronthaul timing and on interoperating with a di…
A private 5G deployment is a network engineering job, not a product install. The site had coverage the public carrier was never going to build, devices that had to move without dro…
Timing closure is the milestone everyone celebrates and the one that proves least. A block can meet timing on the report and still fail signoff — on power, on IR-drop, on an …
A safety-critical chip is not judged only on working — it is judged on what it does when something breaks. To an ISO 26262 ASIL target, the design has to detect a dangerous fault a…
On a cell line the dangerous defect is rare, faint and expensive to miss. Contamination, coating flaws and edge damage are safety-relevant, appear on a fraction of a percent of cel…
You are inspecting a moving cavity of shiny metal, hundreds a minute, for a fleck you must not miss. Beverage-can inner-wall inspection is defined by three physical facts — it is a…
Detecting a tag is trivial; placing it to sub-metre inside a steel-framed building is not. The angle-of-arrival maths is textbook — the engineering is everything that corrupts the …
A chip that passes every simulation can still ship defects the tester never checks. Design-for-test is what makes manufacturing faults reachable from the pins — and doing it withou…
Writing correct power intent is the easy part; keeping it true through implementation is not. A multi-domain SoC lives or dies on isolation, level shifting, retention and gating th…
A tracker that reports beautifully and dies in four months is a failed product. On a low-power wide-area device the radio is the easy part; the design lives in microamps of sleep c…
The problem with solder inspection is not finding defects — it is not crying wolf. A populated board has thousands of joints, most cosmetically imperfect and functionally fine. An …
A relay attack does not break the crypto — it shortens the distance. For keyless entry and access, the question is not how far away the device is but whether an attacker can convin…
For a temperature-sensitive shipment, the record is the product. A cold-chain monitor has to log that goods stayed in range for the whole journey, survive weeks on a small battery …
A fatigue monitor earns its place by being right — a system that cries wolf is taped over by lunchtime. Detecting eye closure and distraction from an in-cab camera is only useful i…
Pushing current into a car is the easy claim; a charge point is really a safety system, a billing meter and a connected device wearing one enclosure. The controller has to negotiat…
Every vehicle already knows its own speed, load and faults — the trick is getting that off the bus and into the back office without draining the battery or losing data in a tunnel.…
GNSS is superb outdoors and useless in a tunnel — and the position still has to be right. Holding an accurate location through urban canyons, underpasses and indoor stretches means…
A failing bearing announces itself long before it seizes — if you know how to listen. An edge condition monitor turns raw vibration into early warning, and the hard part is not the…
Proximity by signal strength is trivially spoofed; proximity by time-of-flight is not. Ultra-wideband ranging measures how long light itself takes to travel to a credential and bac…
Fixed wireless access has to feel like a wired line while running over a radio link that never sits still. The customer-premises device must find and hold the best beam, sustain th…
A DDR link that runs on the bench proves the easy case. The subsystem has to hold timing and signal integrity across voltage, temperature and process, through training and calibrat…
The body is a noisy place to take a measurement. A wrist- or body-worn sensor has to pull a small physiological signal out of constant motion, run for days on a tiny battery, and p…
A power-management IC has to be efficient, quiet and stable simultaneously, into a load that misbehaves. Every rail is a compromise between conversion efficiency, output noise and …
The ability to update a device in the field is also the attacker's way in. A firmware root of trust ensures only authentic code runs, that an update cannot be forged or silently ro…
Inside the die the data is clean; the trouble begins at the pins. A multi-gigabit SerDes has to push bits across a lossy, reflective channel and recover them at the far end, and wh…
A utility meter is deployed once and expected to be right, connected and honest for the better part of two decades. That makes it a metrology device, a low-power radio and a securi…
A chip is not verified because the tests pass — it is verified when you can show what has not been tested is not there. Coverage closure is the discipline of measuring what has act…
A printed web moves too fast for a snapshot and never stops for a second look. Inspecting it for registration, colour and defects at metres per second is a line-scan and real-time-…
Weld inspection is a hostile imaging problem wearing a defect-detection label. The seam is bright, reflective and sometimes still glowing, the defects are safety-relevant, and unle…
Each of these has a section called What was hard, listing the four or five things that actually consumed the schedule. On the inspection programme that is “Lighting decided the project” and “Worst case, not average”. On the conversion it is that reset architecture was the largest single item and nobody had scoped it.
None of that flatters us. It is here because an engineer evaluating a supplier for the same class of programme learns more from it than from a summary of what went well — and because a supplier who will not describe a difficulty is a supplier who has not had many.
Every study also links into the products, platforms and technology pages the work rested on, so a claim can be followed to the page that substantiates it.
Because most engineering engagements are covered by confidentiality agreements, and several are in defence, secure identity or competitive product areas where naming the customer would disclose their roadmap. Where a customer approves disclosure, it is stated.
Specific architectures, measured results, node and foundry experience, tool flows and team composition — within the limits each customer has agreed.
Because a reader evaluating a supplier for the same class of programme learns more from what consumed the schedule than from a summary of what went well. A supplier who will not describe a difficulty is a supplier who has not had many.
Tell us the specification, the constraint and the deadline. Programmes that cross silicon, radio, embedded and AI are where Faststream is strongest.