The shop you call when the board doesn’t work.
Board bring-up, marginal-system debugging, and rescue for hardware companies — the full stack, from analog and RF through PCB, FPGA, and bare-metal firmware.
First power-on through a working board support package: power sequencing, clocks and resets, pin mux, peripheral validation, drivers, and the bootloader — the low-level layer that gets your RTOS or application running on the board. Quoted per board revision — plannable, fixed-price.
The faults that live at the hardware/firmware boundary and don’t reproduce on demand: I²C/SPI bus hangs, brownout and power-integrity resets, race conditions, EMC-driven misbehavior, the bug that appears once per four hundred power cycles. Diagnosed with instruments, not guesses.
Stalled, inherited, or contractor-abandoned code carried to shippable: bootloaders and OTA/DFU, RTOS integration, driver completion, timing closure — the last brutal 20% before your pilot or production date.
Because most “firmware bugs” aren’t. We work the analog and RF layers, PCB-level diagnosis, and FPGA logic alongside the code. One vendor for the whole boundary — and comfortable on legacy silicon (CPLDs, older PICs, 5V and through-hole designs) that most consultants have never touched.
Twenty-five years at the hard boundary between firmware and physical hardware — the part where a “software bug” turns out to be a starved rail, a marginal pull-up, a clock-stretch deadlock, or a layout problem no amount of code will fix. Bring-up and marginal-system debugging are the work I run toward: the tighter the deadline and the stranger the failure, the more I want the problem.
Named inventor on eight U.S. patents across ion-implanter beam control (Varian Semiconductor) and FMCW LIDAR, photonic integrated circuits, and coherent optical ranging — including methods for GHz-class sensing with low-cost components. As VP Engineering at a Cornell-affiliated photonics startup, architected a MEMS FMCW LIDAR program end to end: laser bias supplies from FETs and op-amps, the RF signal chain, FPGA signal processing, custom PCBs, and the bare-metal firmware that tied it together. Earlier, at Varian, built the firmware and led bring-up for a next-generation MeV dose-control system.
This is active practice, not history: I’ve been designing PCBs, power supplies, and bringing up boards on modern silicon continuously, right up to today — not a retired engineer trading on old glory. Today that work is Critical Firmware.
Critical Firmware, LLC — Philadelphia area · clients nationwide
Bring-up · marginal-system debugging · firmware rescue