Prototyping and Product Development for San Diego Hardware Teams

San Diego hardware runs on radios, sensors and regulation

San Diego is one of the country's centers of wireless engineering. The industry grew out of military communications research and the digital communications companies founded there from the 1970s on, and it left a deep bench of RF and modem expertise. Alongside it sit a large life-science cluster on Torrey Pines Mesa and in Sorrento Valley, with medical device and laboratory instrument companies around it, and research hardware from UC San Diego and its Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The Navy's Pacific Fleet has its principal homeport in San Diego, which brings defense electronics and marine engineering with it.

Buyers here know the technology. What a San Diego team usually needs from an outside firm is the rest of the product built to the standard its RF or regulatory specialists expect: the board, the firmware, the enclosure and the road to production.

Wireless products: the antenna is a mechanical decision

Many wireless products that fail certification or underperform in the field fail for mechanical reasons. The antenna ended up beside a battery, a metal bezel or a hand, the ground plane was shortened to fit the case, or the matching network was never tuned inside the real housing. We decide antenna type and placement together with the enclosure and board outline, leave footprints for a pi matching network, and tune with a vector network analyzer in the actual enclosure before any pre-compliance scan.

For cellular and most short-range radios, a pre-certified module usually saves months. Under FCC modular approval the module's transmitter grant can carry over, leaving your product mainly the unintentional-emissions testing and labeling, as long as the module's antenna and integration conditions are followed; a chip-down radio needs its own full certification. Cellular devices also face carrier and PTCRB requirements on top of the FCC. The free certification cost estimator puts numbers on those choices, and EMC by design covers the layout habits that pass the first time.

Medical devices and life-science instruments

For a medical device, the prototype phase is where regulatory work is cheapest to do right. Since February 2026 the FDA's Quality Management System Regulation incorporates ISO 13485, so design controls mean documented design inputs, outputs, reviews, verification and validation, tied to an ISO 14971 risk file. On the electrical side, IEC 60601-1 sets safety requirements such as creepage, clearance and leakage current, IEC 60601-1-2 covers electromagnetic compatibility, and device software follows IEC 62304. We keep those records as we go, so early engineering can be referenced in your design file instead of redone.

Lab instruments that are not medical devices skip the FDA but keep the hard parts: low-noise analog front ends, precise motion and temperature control, and software a scientist can trust. Our own medtech work includes the software behind ELDA BrainTech's neurodiagnostic device, with real-time acquisition from FPGA-based hardware; the case study explains how that engagement ran, and medical device PCB design covers the board side.

Marine and defense hardware: salt, water and pressure

Hardware that lives on or under the Pacific has its own failure modes. Salt fog corrodes exposed copper and connector contacts, dissimilar metals in contact corrode galvanically, and a seal that passed a bench test can leak after a hundred thermal cycles. We specify enclosures and gaskets against the IP rating the product needs, often IP67 or IP68, pick stainless grades and plastics that tolerate seawater, plan conformal coating, and test seals through temperature cycling rather than a single dunk. Electronics on boats usually need to speak NMEA 2000, which is built on CAN. More in our enclosure design guide.

From prototype to a line in San Diego or Baja California

Many San Diego companies manufacture in Tijuana and the wider Baja California corridor, which has a large medical device base. A line across the border, or anywhere outside your building, can only build what is written down. Our manufacturing transfer work produces the package a contract manufacturer needs: DFM-reviewed boards and parts, assembly drawings and work instructions, a functional test fixture with pass and fail limits, and golden reference units. The road from EVT to that line is laid out in NPI: from prototype to mass production.

Serving San Diego from Silicon Valley

We do not have a San Diego office; our one base is in Silicon Valley, about an hour and a half by air from San Diego International. Design reviews happen on video with the hardware under a camera, the repository and CAD are shared, and every working hour overlaps because we keep the same clock. Boards are brought up on our bench before they ship, so they reach you with notes and test results, usually within one to two days by ground or overnight by air. We travel for the moments that need hands on hardware: a first power-on with real risk in it, RF tuning in your lab, or the first day at a contract manufacturer.

The work itself spans PCB design, firmware for BLE, Wi-Fi, LTE-M and sub-GHz radios, mechanical design for sealed housings, and rapid prototyping through EVT, DVT and PVT builds.