Crown Jewel Press · First edition, November 2026
Harvesting the Crown Jewel
Tools for electronics got better. The workflow never became whole.
The Unfinished Search for a Unified Design Workflow
By D. K. Singh · 216 pages
Every electronic product begins as an intention — what it must sense, compute, power and endure. Preserving that intention across the teams and tools that build it remains an unsolved problem.
A phone, a car, a ventilator, an industrial machine. Each starts as an idea, and then enters engineering — where it becomes an architecture, a set of semiconductors, a circuit, a board, firmware, a thermal problem, a supply chain, a factory. Each discipline has powerful tools and deep expertise. But as the work moves from one team, tool and company to the next, who keeps the reasoning behind the whole product connected?
Harvesting the Crown Jewel tells the four-decade story of the people who came closest — above all Nick Martin, the engineer in Tasmania who was locked out of his profession’s tools and so wrote his own, put professional PCB design on the working engineer’s desk, and built one of the industry’s most enduring instruments before losing control of the company he founded.
The story widens from Protel and Altium to Cadence, to Mentor and Siemens, to the cloud collaboration that arrived in the same month the world stopped meeting in rooms — and ends where a maker of the components themselves bought a major board-level design workflow. Ownership changes the opportunity. Whether it changes the outcome is the unfinished question.
Part technology history, part business story, part firsthand engineering narrative — written by someone who has spent twenty-five years on both sides of the divide it describes.
Crown Jewel Press · First edition, November 2026
Chapter 14: When Silicon Bought the Workflow
The author works at Renesas, and the book is undergoing the appropriate conflict-of-interest review. Join the launch list to receive the publication note and purchasing links when they are available.
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Advance praise
The arc
Six movements, one question
Part I
The access problem
A tool priced like a building becomes a building: it gets a room, a schedule, a queue, and an operator. Then the price of computing collapsed, and an engineer in Hobart wrote his own.
Part II
Why it endured
What accumulates inside a design environment — the trusted library, the inherited design, the production history, the fluency in the hands. Memory is the asset you measure by losing it.
Part III
Ahead of the market
Two documents from 1999 show a company claiming far more than the market was ready to buy. The destination had logic. The schedule did not.
Part IV
The fall and the return
A founder terminated in six contested weeks, a direction that outlived him, and a second lane that had left the company in 2000 and quietly come back.
Part V
The harvest
Accumulated trust becomes recurring revenue becomes acquisition capacity. The engineer’s capital and the vendor’s moat turn out to be one asset seen from two sides.
Part VI
The unfinished bridge
The cloud arrives around the desktop, silicon buys the workflow, and the reasoning of the whole product still has nowhere to live.
From Chapter 14
Five tests, and no verdict
The book refuses to grade the wager at the centre of its own story. Instead it states what the evidence would have to look like — so that readers can score it themselves, in public, over years.
About the author
D. K. Singh
His journey into electronics began on a rooftop in Patna, Bihar. In 1982 his family brought home its first television, and DK was sent up to turn the antenna. Something between the antenna in his hands and the image appearing below captured his imagination, and he has never really left it.
He began at Onida in India, then moved to Yokohama as a system design engineer at JVC — the bench where this book starts. Japan became a defining part of his life: thirteen years, the language, and work across engineering, applications and business development. In 2013 he moved to San Jose, and following Renesas’ acquisition of Intersil he built and led a global systems-and-solutions organization spanning devices, boards, software and tools.
He describes his career as reverse-engineered: from system design to silicon, from individual tools to the architecture of the design process itself. That path has placed him on both sides of the divide this book explores, and he appears in its later chapters in that capacity.
He lives in San Jose, California. Electronics is his first love; artificial intelligence is his second, and he believes their combination will define the next chapter of electronic-system design.
Author's Note
“This book was independently authored. It was not commissioned by Renesas, Altium, or any other company discussed in these pages, and no company controlled its argument or conclusions. The judgments — and any errors — are mine.”
“I do not stand outside this story… I am quoted in public company announcements examined by the book, and I participated in several of the programs it evaluates. Where the narrative judges work in which I had a role, I have tried to apply the same standard used elsewhere.”
“One judgment deserves to be stated before the story begins, because my employment could be assumed to predetermine it. This book treats the combination of Renesas and Altium as an open test, not a foregone answer.”