One engineer, no account management, no junior on the invoice
The person who takes your call is the person who reads your design and writes the report.
Who I am
I’m a principal-level hardware engineer in aerospace and defence. Day to day that means system and schematic level board design, FPGA development, and technical leadership across a design team. Cadence System Capture and Allegro professionally, Vivado, Quartus and Libero across the FPGA vendors, and my own line of FPGA development hardware alongside it.
Consultana is how I sell that experience directly to people who need a second competent opinion and don’t have one in the building.
What that background gives you, concretely: familiarity with qualified parts and derating policy rather than commercial-grade shortcuts. A habit of designing and checking against worst case rather than typical. Datasheet sections cited rather than remembered. And a working knowledge of what environmental requirements actually do to a design, because I work to them.
How I work
Spec and block diagram first. Requirements, architecture and key parts get nailed down before any schematic capture. That’s how I design, and it’s why the architecture review exists as a product.
Marked-up PDFs and redlines. Reviews are done the way peer review is actually done, with annotations, not by generating a document. The report comes out of the redlines.
Rationale over conclusions. Every finding says why. The first signal of competence in anyone’s work is whether you can see the reasoning, and I hold my own output to the same test.
Worst case, not nominal. Most designs are reviewed at 25 °C and nominal supply, and fail at the corner. The corners are where I spend the time.
Things I refuse to do
- Use a part I can’t fully understand and defend.
- Treat a vendor reference design as gospel. They are demo-grade more often than anyone admits.
- Paper over a known risk to hit a milestone.
- Give a confident answer where I’m actually unsure. You get “I couldn’t verify this, and here’s what each answer would mean” instead.
Where I stop
Board-level digital and mixed signal, power architecture, FPGA and RTL, timing and constraints, system architecture, PCB layout and fab packages.
Not RF and microwave above incidental levels, not precision analog below the board-review level, not mains-connected safety-certified design, not mechanical or structural, and not firmware beyond the register-map boundary. If part of your job falls outside that, I name it as excluded in the proposal rather than quietly guessing at it.
How conflicts are handled
An independent review is worth buying because it is independent. That is worth protecting properly rather than asserting on a website, so here is the actual process.
Before the first call I run a conflict check covering five things: whether you compete with my employer, whether you compete with my own product line, whether I am already reviewing a competing design on the same programme or for the same end customer, whether I have any financial or personal interest, and whether I had any prior involvement in the design under review.
Any of those and I either decline, or disclose it in writing before we go further and let you decide with the disclosure on record. Prior involvement in the design and reviewing competing bidders are hard declines with no disclosure route, because nobody can independently review their own work, including the parts of it they’ve forgotten doing.
I won’t review a competing design on the same programme for the duration of an engagement and for six months after it.
The day job
Consultana runs alongside a full-time role, and the two are kept physically separate. Separate machines and storage, separate tooling and licences, no Consultana work on employer hardware, and nothing an employer holds in confidence ever reaches a Consultana client.
The practical effect for you is honest turnaround quoting. I quote what I can actually deliver around a full-time job rather than what you want to hear, which usually means starting within one to two weeks. A review delivered a week late by agreement is fine. One delivered late by surprise is not.
Confidentiality
Happy to work under your NDA or mine. Everything is stored encrypted and separately per client. Your design files are deleted 90 days after close-out with written confirmation, and I keep only the report, the register and the working record that supports the opinion I gave.
I won’t name you or describe your design in any marketing without written consent, and the reviews I’ve done for other people are not something I will discuss with you either.
Who this suits, and who it doesn’t
Good fit
- Hardware teams of one to ten engineers with no independent reviewer available.
- Startups approaching a first real production spin.
- Companies whose hardware expertise left with a departing engineer.
- Anyone building in a regulated or high-reliability space without the internal process to match.
- A programme where someone senior has a bad feeling and wants it checked without making it political. That’s more common than people admit, and discretion is part of the service.
Poor fit
- Anyone who wants a rubber stamp. If the fab slot is booked and the design can’t change, a review is theatre and I’ll say so on the first call.
- Anyone who can’t share enough of the design to review it properly.
- Anyone whose real problem is that they need a designer. That’s a different service and taking it as a review disappoints both of us.
- Export controlled or classified work. I’m not set up with the facilities or clearances, so let’s establish classification before anything is shared.
Turning down a job that doesn’t fit is cheaper for both of us than delivering a review that lands badly. If your enquiry is one of those, you’ll hear it early and I’ll point you at someone else where I can.
Worth a conversation?
Thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation. Worst case you get an honest opinion on whether a review is worth buying at all.