Hardware · Firmware · Security · RF
From idea to manufacturable product.
We design, reverse-engineer and re-engineer consumer and industrial electronics: circuits, boards, firmware and enclosure, with security built in from the start.
Everything an electronic product needs
Bitqan Systems Design is an electronics, hardware security and embedded engineering design firm in Abu Dhabi that takes consumer and industrial electronics from idea to manufacturing.
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Electronics & mechanical
The physical product: schematics, layouts and enclosures designed together and prepared for the factory.
- Electronic and PCB design, from schematic to design for manufacturing
- Mechanical design and enclosures
- Productization consulting, from working prototypes to shippable products
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Firmware & FPGA
The code closest to the silicon: bare-metal and RTOS firmware, and FPGA logic where a processor is not fast or deterministic enough.
- Firmware development and embedded systems design
- FPGA design and signal processing
- Software defined radio (SDR)
- High-throughput, low-latency and real-time network applications
- Ultra-low-power sensor networks
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RF & localization
Radio and acoustics from the antenna in: front ends, modems and software defined radio, plus localization and GNSS that keep working under interference.
- Antenna design, RF front ends, software defined radio, RF and audio modems
- Acoustic and radio real-time localization
- GNSS resilience against jamming and spoofing
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Security & IoT
Security decided at architecture time, and power budgets that let a device run for years on a small battery.
- Secure systems: secure boot, key storage, on-device encryption, security reviews
- IoT devices built to run for years on small batteries
Start from an existing device
Not every project starts with an idea. Some start with a device: a
product whose documentation is gone, a bus or radio protocol nobody
wrote down, an encryption scheme that has to be assessed, or a black
box you need to talk to. We take it apart, work out how it does what
it does, and write it down. The outcome is yours to pick: a
re-engineered design ready for manufacturing, hardware or firmware
that interoperates with the original, or an assessment of the scheme
with a hardened replacement.
For devices that are too large or too sensitive to ship, the initial
analysis happens on site at your premises.
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Electronics & mechanical
Board-level teardown of the device: every part identified, the schematic recovered from the layout, test points and debug ports mapped, the enclosure measured. From there we redesign the circuits around components that went obsolete or out of stock, leave the rest untouched, fix what the original got wrong, and hand over production files for a board that fits the existing housing or a new one.
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Firmware & FPGA
Firmware read out of flash or over a debug port, disassembled and annotated until the protocols, state machines and update mechanism are understood. When the code cannot be read, the behavior is reconstructed from the traffic between the chips instead. The result is a documented behavior model and, if you want it, a clean re-implementation on current silicon, or on an FPGA where timing matters.
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Protocols, radio devices & SDR
Protocols in the widest sense, wired and wireless. On the bench, UART, RS-485, RS-422, CAN, Modbus, SPI, I²C and similar buses are tapped and decoded into a written specification. Over the air, undocumented radio links are captured with software defined radio and their modulation, framing, timing and channel hopping recovered: proprietary sub-GHz and 2.4 GHz links as well as RFID and NFC at 125 kHz, 13.56 MHz and UHF, readers, cards and tags included. The specification becomes a receiver, a compatible transmitter, a bridge or a reader that interoperates with the original.
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Security & IoT
Firmware nobody documented is pulled from the device and inventoried into a software bill of materials: the components and versions inside it and the known vulnerabilities they carry, as the groundwork for a security assessment. Proprietary encryption and authentication schemes taken apart: key derivation and storage, the boot chain, the update path, and how a device proves it is genuine. Weaknesses are documented with a working demonstration and their impact on the whole installation, not just the unit on the bench. Then we design the hardened replacement: secure boot, protected keys and an update mechanism that holds.
See your product early, and often
We work in short iterations. You get working hardware and firmware in your hands early, give feedback, and each round moves the design closer to what you actually need. Problems show up while they are still cheap to fix, which lowers the risk of the project and raises the quality of what ships.
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Early visibility
A working prototype in the first weeks, not a slide deck at the end.
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Feedback every round
Your input goes straight into the next iteration of schematic, firmware and enclosure.
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Lower risk, higher quality
Wrong assumptions are caught before they reach the factory, and every iteration is measured against the requirements.
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Step 01 / 03
Discovery & architecture
We start with what the product has to do, where it will run and what it must resist. For an existing device, we start with what it does today and what has to change. Out of that comes a system architecture, a parts strategy and a plan with real milestones, each one ending in something you can see and try.
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Step 02 / 03
Prototype, show, iterate
The first working prototype arrives early, not at the end. You try it, we measure it against the requirements, and the next iteration folds in your feedback. Schematics, layout, firmware and mechanics evolve together, so surprises surface while they are still cheap to fix.
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Step 03 / 03
Productize & hand over
Once the design has been through its feedback rounds, we prepare it for manufacturing: DFM review, test procedures, documentation and a clean handover to your factory or your own team.
OpenBeacon: Open hardware for open beacons
Founded in 2006, OpenBeacon became the sensor platform of the SocioPatterns research collaboration: coin-cell tags on the Nordic nRF51822 that detect face-to-face contacts at half-metre resolution, log them offline for weeks and report to Power-over-Ethernet readers, with schematics, layouts and firmware published as open source.
- Role
- Founder, hardware and firmware design
- Started
- 2006, Bitmanufaktur GmbH, Berlin
- Platform
- Nordic nRF51822, Arm Cortex-M0, 2.4 GHz
- Licenses
- GPLv2 firmware, CC BY-SA 4.0 hardware
Tell us what you want to build.
Write to us at contact@bitqan.ae for collaboration or a free consultation. We look forward to hearing from you!
