One point of technical ownership

Founded by Rich Varone.

For over fourteen years he was a senior embedded and firmware engineer at a Long Island manufacturer of rugged electronics for defense and avionics — firmware and drivers across most of the company's product lines, new board designs brought up from first power-on, and development to DO-178C and DO-254 Design Assurance Level A, the level that applies when a failure is catastrophic.

That work was rarely confined to firmware. He led a compact multi-processor power supply from concept through qualification, owning the software, the schematic and PCB layout, the thermal and heatsink design, and the environmental testing. He led a relay motherboard built on a Xilinx Zynq SoC with Altera CPLDs — layout review, bring-up, FPGA and CPLD logic, bootloader, and both the RTOS and Linux software. He architected a modular I/O framework designed from the outset for certification-artifact reuse, and a bootloader deployed across an entire ARM product line with field firmware update, multiple boot partitions, startup Built-In Test, and FPGA programming.

That range is why BroadForge is organized the way it is. The four practices are not four teams — they are the four kinds of problem one engineer has spent a career solving in the same room, and the reason a client never has to arbitrate between a firmware vendor and a hardware vendor about whose fault it is.