About

We design the boards other companies ship.

Arcane Embedded is an independent electronics design house in Cluj-Napoca. We take connected industrial, edge-AI and unmanned systems from an idea to hardware that can be manufactured — and we have nothing on a shelf to sell you.

What we do

Embedded hardware: PCBs, custom System-on-Modules, carrier boards and the RF, power and sensing electronics around them. Schematic to layout to fabrication package to a board booting on the bench.

The technical work spans SMARC 2.1 and SGET OSM module standards, Renesas RZ and ST silicon, DDR4 fly-by routing, MIPI CSI-2 camera pipelines, PCIe, rigid-flex construction, UAV avionics and marine autonomy hardware. The capability sheet is the long version.

How we are set up

Senior engineers, no layers in between. There is no account manager between you and the people designing your board, and no junior learning the standard on your schedule. The engineer who answers your question is the one who routed the DDR.

Where a program needs specialisms we do not carry in-house — mechanical design, certification testing, FPGA RTL, deep kernel work — we bring in vetted partners under our accountability rather than handing you another contract to manage. What we do not do, we say we do not do.

No catalog, no agenda

Design houses that sell modules recommend the modules they sell. That is gravity rather than dishonesty, and it is exactly why a vendor-neutral opinion is worth paying for.

We have no product line to protect, so the silicon recommendation follows your requirements: Renesas RZ, ST STM32 and STM32MP, NXP i.MX, TI Sitara and AM62 — whichever actually fits your interface list, thermal envelope, longevity requirement and unit cost. Occasionally the honest answer is "buy an off-the-shelf module and spend the NRE elsewhere," and that answer is free.

Working across Europe

EU-based, EU jurisdiction for your IP, GDPR-clean, and full transfer of everything we produce — native source files, not just outputs. No offshore handover gap and no timezone offset: a question asked in the morning is answered the same morning.

Project communication runs in English, Romanian or German. For clients in the DACH region that matters more than it should have to — technical reviews conducted in German, and a short flight rather than a twelve-hour time difference.

How we handle your material

Anything you send us is confidential, and we are happy to sign your NDA before you go into detail rather than after. Client names, branding, design files and system parameters are not published — the case studies on this site are deliberately anonymized and describe engineering rather than identifying products.

You can expect the same treatment. In several of the sectors we work in, discretion is a qualification rather than an inconvenience.

Who you work with

The people, not the pipeline

Our whole proposition is that you talk to the engineers doing the work. That claim is worth nothing if we do not say who they are.

TEAM-01

Portrait at the bench — working, not posed against a wall.

  • Window light, overheads off
  • Board or scope in frame
  • Waist-up, off-centre

Alexandru Ioniță

Founder & Principal Hardware Engineer

Leads hardware architecture and layout. Ten years in embedded design across System-on-Module and carrier board work, UAV avionics, marine autonomy and industrial control — on Renesas RZ, ST, NXP and TI silicon, in Altium and KiCad. Runs board bring-up from first power-on through bootloader, and the failure analysis when a board does not behave.

  • System-on-Module and carrier board design
  • High-speed layout — DDR4, MIPI CSI-2, PCIe
  • RF integration and power electronics
  • Board bring-up and failure analysis

English · Română · Deutsch

For programs that need more hands we bring in vetted specialists — mechanical design, certification testing, deep firmware — under our accountability. You will be told who is doing what before they start.

The bench

Where the work happens

These slots are waiting for photographs of our own hardware and workspace. Nothing on this site is stock imagery, and nothing is a render derived from a client's design files.

ABOUT-01

The bring-up bench: scope, bench supply, board under test, probes attached.

  • Warm side light, dark surroundings
  • Screen on, showing a real trace
  • Slightly messy reads as real work
ABOUT-02

A group of our own boards on an anti-static mat, top-down.

  • Only hardware we own and can publish
  • Range of sizes shows range of work
  • Check for third-party branding first
ABOUT-03

Macro of a dense region — fine-pitch BGA, connector field or RF section.

  • Warm light raking across the board
  • Shallow depth of field
  • Our own hardware only

Start with a conversation, not a contract.

Thirty minutes with an engineer. Tell us what you're building and we'll tell you what's hard about it — whether or not it turns into a project.