Electrical engineers have been designing custom circuit boards on computers for years, but this approach has moved the paper-and-pencil method to digital. It didn’t advance the craft or make it easier for engineers to reuse design elements within a design. They always had to start from scratch, even if they were able to apply the lessons they picked up along the way.
A start-up from three Berkeley students, GITX, realized that the digital approach to board design hadn’t changed much and saw an opening. They have created a new way of board design by using code to describe what the board looks like. Today, the company announced the general availability of that product and a previously unannounced $12 million Series A.
“Engineers today use very graphic tools to design schematics and circuit boards, and that’s not productive enough anymore. There is a lot of design work. The systems are too complex to design without errors. So Gitx is changing that by allowing engineers to write code to create their designs and bringing the benefits of software to hardware design,” co-founder and CEO Duncan Haldane told TechCrunch.
He says this has a number of benefits, including reusability, increased productivity, a simple and automated review process, and the ability to share and collaborate on designs in a meaningful way.
The company developed a coding language that Haldane talks about with electrical engineers and how they work.
“We developed a programming language and a tutorial for electrical engineers. So basically an electrical engineer thinks about problems in a certain way – I need to design this IoT device. I need to have this radio. I want this battery to last five years. And I need this microcontroller – and you’re really at a high level.” We’ve provided a language for you to define so you can get started, and then the compiler will start filling in the details for you.
He says the language is something that engineers need to understand, having already written Python scripts to test board designs.
A Gitx code screen where engineers describe what a circuit board should look like in code. Image Credits: don’t worry
Another important thing GitX does is make it easy to test the design to make sure it’s correct. Today, this involves getting lots of people to critique and criticize to make sure it works. Gitx wants to bring automation to the design review process to automatically test the design and move it to production faster.
The origin of the idea is that Haldane In 2013, he will return to the work he performed as a grad student. As the idea of code-based circuit design grew, he started the company in 2017 by meeting with the founders.
Gitx embeds this silicon wafer in a 2,0500 complex 300um grid. Image Credits: don’t worry
It started out as a design consultancy that helped companies design circuit boards, but they moved this way to bring more automation to the design process and build the solutions they have today before they go into production.
The company currently has 18 employees. Developing a diverse workforce is a challenge, he says, especially in a sector that requires highly specialized skills, but the organization is working on it and looking at ways to recruit candidates from historically underrepresented groups. “The only way we’re going to solve inclusion is to work hard at finding people. You hire someone not because they’re diverse, but because they’re underrepresented, so you have to work hard to find them,” he said.
A $12 million investment closed last year. Led by Sequoia Capital and participating with Y Combinator, Funders Club and Liquid 2, the company was a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2018 cohort and was one of the 10 startups that caught the eye of TechCrunch reporters covering their demo day.
