An engineer probing a circuit board with an oscilloscope probe while the trace is read out alongside it.

AI-enabled
hardware-in-the-loop
testing, on real hardware.

Validation that used to take months at the bench, done in a fraction of the time, with an engineer accountable for every result. The future of embedded testing starts here.

The slow part of shipping a device was never writing the firmware.

Development moves quickly. Validation does not. Tests remain serial, human-dependent, and constrained by the availability of the engineers running them.

Wiring a test rig by hand

Scoping a signal that only misbehaves under load

Reproducing a fault that appeared once in the field

Waiting for the one engineer who knows how the rig is cabled

Doing it all again when the pinout changes

Lead time to a working product is mostly lead time through the bench. Shorten that and the whole schedule moves.

Two loops

AI closed the software loop. Embedded is still waiting.

Software
A closed development loop Write code, deploy, observe and iterate sit on an unbroken circle, so each step feeds back into the next without a person in between. Write code Deploy Observe Iterate

The loop is closed. An agent writes, deploys, sees exactly what happens, and iterates. That visibility is why software teams ship in days.

Embedded
The same loop, broken where it meets real hardware Write firmware and flash are joined, but the arc that would carry what the hardware did back to the agent is missing. The circle is open at the bottom, and that gap is real hardware, where a person with instruments has to read the result by hand. Write firmware Flash Real hardware loop breaks here Blind

The same AI writes the firmware, but on real hardware it is blind. Testing falls back to a person with a scope, and the schedule falls back to weeks.

Synapsio closes that gap. It puts the bench in the loop, so testing on real hardware moves the way software testing already does.

The alternative

The same board, tested two ways

Manual bench testing
Develop
Manual validation
Ships
Weeks, in series
AI-enabled testing
Develop
Validate, alongside
Ships
← time recovered →
Days, in parallel
 
Manual bench testing
AI-enabled testing
When tests run
After development, when an engineer is free
On every build, alongside development
Setting up a test
Hand-wired. Redone for every revision
Declared once against the spec. Regenerated
What gets tested
What someone remembers to check
What the spec says to check. Every time
When a test fails
“It rebooted.” A week with a scope
A timestamp, a signal, a line of firmware
Regression after a fix
By hand, or skipped under pressure
Automatic and permanent
Where the knowledge lives
One engineer’s head
The spec and the run history
Time to validated firmware
Weeks, in series
Days, in parallel

The difference is not automation. One runs in series after development; one runs alongside it. That is where the lead time comes from.

Outcomes

Validation time is lead time, lead time is market position.

Three outcomes. One fundamental shift: validation no longer has to move at human speed.

Validation that keeps pace with development

Stimulus, capture and assertion against the spec, on real hardware, on every build. A fault introduced on Tuesday is found on Tuesday, not at the end of the sprint.

Lead time measured in days, not quarters

Validation runs in parallel, compressing development cycles and bringing EVT, DVT, and every milestone that follows closer to production.

Earlier to Market

The first product to ship reliably sets the reference. Shorter validation cycles put products in the field while others are still reproducing faults.

Featured case

Ran on a Better Devices board before anyone else’s.

Fine-pitch rework under magnification on the second revision of the developmental gateway board.
14 days to a verified board: firmware, bench and regression suite, on a known pinout

We used our AI-HIL platform to build its own hardware.

Before this was offered to a single client, Better Devices used Synapsio to bring up and validate the second revision of a developmental gateway. Firmware, bench and regression suite were done in fourteen days on a board with a known pinout.

The bench caught two faults that software-in-the-loop testing would have passed.

01

A DMA ring buffer losing one byte under bus contention

02

A rail sag crossing a logic threshold, found before layout freeze

Both found in the first week, not the field. The full case study has the numbers, the timeline with its caveats, and the name of the engineer who ran it.

Read the case study →

Explore the Future of Device Validation

Synapsio is built and operated by Better Devices, embedded engineering consultancy, Berlin.