Insights

Field notes from the line.

Specific, practical writing on building and sourcing hardware in China — the things we wish more Western teams knew before they started. No hype, just what we see.

Trust

Protecting your IP when you manufacture in China

NDAs are necessary and nowhere near sufficient. What actually keeps your design yours — from how you split a BOM to who holds the tooling.

20 May 20266 min read Read Process

From prototype to production: where hardware timelines slip

The schedule rarely breaks where teams expect. The usual culprits are tooling, long-lead components and the second EVT build — not the engineering.

6 May 20267 min read Read Procurement

Spotting counterfeit components before they reach your line

Re-marked parts, recycled silicon, empty packages. The diligence we run on hard-to-source components — date codes, decap, X-ray and electrical test.

8 Apr 20266 min read Read Procurement

A field guide to sourcing end-of-life components

When a part goes EOL, you have more options than a last-time buy. Authorised stock, franchised excess, re-engineering and qualified alternates.

4 Mar 20267 min read Read Hardware

What design for manufacturing actually changes on your BOM

DFM is not a review at the end. Done early, it quietly removes cost and risk from every line of your bill of materials. Here is what moves.

11 Feb 20266 min read Read Quality

What we actually check in a factory audit

A walk through a supplier audit as we run it — systems, process control, traceability and the questions that reveal how a factory really behaves.

20 Jan 20266 min read Read