Modern electronic designs demand a wide range of troubleshooting skills to accurately assess the true causes of problems, often when the apparent cause leads the inexperienced engineer down the wrong investigative path. There are times when you hit a brick wall with a problem, and need a new set of eyes to solve it. 

Our skill set includes analog, digital, power, microcontrollers, RF and process control.   Whether you are dealing with a hardware design shortcoming or a bug in your software, CRT can provide help.  CRT expertise in reverse engineering has successfully solved seemingly impossible problems in large networks, 'mysterious lockup' conditions in high-reliability controllers, firmware bugs, specification errors, component specification failures,  process control problems, etc.  On a few occasions, CRT was called on to perform 'dead programmer' duty on very old products.   Without so much as a page of source code, we were able to determine how the products worked and to make customer-specified changes to the operation of the systems.

If you have been fighting a 'yield' problem (excessive test failures, for example), that just will not go away, we may be able to help.  It all starts with a schematic, problem description, and some phone time.  (Customer confidentiality is assured with appropriate non-disclosure agreements). 

Our usual approach can be summarized as follows:

• Describe the problem and gather info to support analysis
• Demonstrate/verify the problem
• Make the problem go away, using a variety of troubleshooting techniques, test equipment, controlled experiments
• Make the problem return (to verify the diagnosis)
• Make the problem go away again (to verify the solution)
• Write a report detailing the effort (to document the history of the issue)