Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
You click a button, and thenthe platform's algorithms will look at billions of
component combinations against each other and automaticallyconnect those components at pull offs, pull
down as the coupling while optimizing forcost, size, power, supply chain.
And then the output is a billof materials, schematic verification reports,
supply chain report, and also someother design assets for you. All of
(00:24):
that you can do in sixty tosix hundred seconds. In this episode of
the Bomb Engineering a Path Forward,we set out to explore how one man's
stream can add hundreds of hours backin an electronic engineer's year. As many
of you know, designing the eschematicsof a motherboard can be painstakingly slow and
(00:45):
often tedious. You have dozens ofdifferent parts that can be configured in a
number of ways, and it's entirelypossible that a designer gets halfway through a
build and then has to start overbecause of an issue with a single component.
I'm your host, Magenta Strongheart,and today we're talking with the CEO
of circuit Mind to Meeta at Asami. Here's our conversation. We live in
(01:11):
a time where design and technology touchevery aspect of our lives. But where
did it all come from? Whodesigned it, how is it built and
brought to market? What will looklike in a year, two years,
one hundred years. From the phonesand smartwatches that help us in our day
to day to the cutting edge spaceshipsand three D printers that are leading us
into the future. Modern design isconstantly shaping the way we work, communicate,
problem solve, and play. Andevery new design, bigger, small,
(01:34):
starts with an idea and a billof materials. I'm agenta strongheart,
and this is the bomb where wetalk to leading innovators in the tech world
and celebrate the transformational power of design. So I'd love to start with just
kind of your evolution getting into beingan entrepreneur and starting this company. So
(02:00):
if you could walk us through kindof when you first became interested in engineering
and then how that led you tobeing a founder of circuit Mind to meet.
I'm the co founder and CEO ofcircuit Mind. So before circuit Mind,
I was an electronic systems engineer.When I was growing up, I
wanted to be an inventor. Iloved iron Man. I got into BA
(02:22):
systems. I was leaving the dreambecause I used to build helmet mounted display
systems and heads of display systems withJeff fighter pilots in the Aerospace and Defense
Division. But I think something wasmissing because I was, you know,
I grew up, you know,wanting to be an inventor and wanted to
do all this cool creative stuff andbuild all this hardware. And I was
spending eighty percent of my time notdoing that. As an electronic systems engineer.
(02:47):
I was spending most of my timekind of reading data sheets, looking
at manufacturer websites, firefighting supply chainissues, and you know, the worst
part of it was anxiety. Anxietythat you haven't you know, read page
ninety six of the data sheet properlyand you missed a pull up somewhere.
(03:08):
Anxiety that you chose a component thatmight not be available or has the wrong
lead time, or you know,you haven't factor that in properly. So
on that journey, you know,my journey took a bit of a detour.
I like to say that I leftPA Systems because I got tired of
reading data sheets, but the realreally I just had a visceral passion to
(03:31):
kind of help solve the problem ofhelping electronics engineers be more inventive, spend
most of their time on the thingsthat are creative rather than on the things
that are more routine. Either morecreative or use their experience more. And
so at that time when I metlet be a Hee, I met my
(03:53):
co founder called Basilio. He's anelectrical engineer with two masters in a PhD
in algorithm design from ETAH Soric.So he actually turned down postdocs from UC
Berkeley on Harvard to start Sick inMind with me, and so we we
you know, it was like asort of perfect union where he had this
(04:13):
experience in algorithms, I had thisexperience in electronics, and what we're building
now is algorithms for electronics. Soit's like the foundation is just our experiences,
right, And I think that's kindof classic. You know, you
never really know maybe what problems thereare in that kind of work until you're
doing it yourself and you realize somepart of this could be better, or
this is what could make me actuallylove this job. You know, if
(04:36):
I got to do a little bitmore of this aspect and less of,
like you said, kind of theheadache data sheet reading, cross checking everything
and not having that stress of Imade the wrong decision about something, or
I didn't check it enough times andthat sort of thing. And I think
that's a great segue actually to whatis circumind. Can you dive in a
little bit deeper to what the solutionis that you all are providing for engineers?
(05:00):
Yeah, so I'm glad to dothat. So circuit Mind is algorithmic
software that helps electronics engineers and managersgo from architecture to schematic in sixty seconds
and with that they can get tomarket faster, avoid respins, create smaller,
cheaper, more power efficient products.When you say architecture, for some
(05:24):
of our maybe less technical audience members, what exactly does that mean? What
kind of inputs or foundation do theengineers need to have before they're able to
really take advantage of the tool today, if you're starting a new design,
you're usually starting with a functional blockdiagram or an architecture. As I said,
what does this functional diagram mean?So this is what are the things
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that you want your design to do. Do you want some processing unit which
could be a microcontroller, a microprocessoror FPGA. Do you want certain sensors
to read temperature or accelerometer, etcetera. Do you want to drive a
motor, you can put all ofthis information down as a set of blocks
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and connections together. This is whata functional block diagram. Every engineer starts
from this architecture of block that today. It's just that today they are doing
it in visio or powerpoints or youknow, even a word document or even
a napkin or piece of paper,which is kind of hilarious that people are
still doing something in a word documentin this kind of day and age.
(06:31):
I feel like we find that allthe time with the electronics engineer electronics industry,
that some processes are still so integuated. But it also goes to show
people love what they're used to,you know, and what they're most comfortable
with one hundred percent. And youknow, the idea of circuit mind is
that we think that there's something inbetween when you get an idea and when
(06:56):
you go into your ecan tool rightnow, the thing in between that is
a bunch of Excel spreadsheets, twelvemanufacturer and distributor websites in your chrome tab
jotting, the piece of napkin ofvisio architecture review boards, and then you
know all these different things that aredocumented in different places. But we think
that there's a modality, a workflowthat exists between the point where you have
(07:20):
an idea and the point where younow have to do you know, the
sort of last mild detailed design.Yeah, walk us through the actual workflow
in the platform. The second Mindplatform, like I mentioned sits currently alongside
your ecantle. So an engineer cango into our platform and create their block
(07:42):
diagram by just dragging and dropping theseblocks that are that you would normally be
creating, know in visio Dragon dropthose blocks. You can then on each
of those blocks connect them together.Then you can specify your lower level requirements
on each block or globe. Sowhat does that mean? What does a
low level requirement mean? That justmeans your design intent. If you say
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I want a micro controller, youmight want more to constrain that micro controller
in a certain way. So forinstance, you might say I want an
st micro micro controller, or Iwant my flash memory to have a certain
memory size, or I want myacceleromea to be three access xyz, or
you might even say I know thepart I want here, don't give me
(08:26):
anything else. Wow, So youcan upload the exact part, spify the
exact part you want, and thenyou can so you can go high level
or low level, go to whateverlevel you want for and people have different
levels they want for each block,so you can specify that design intent,
and then you can specify trade offslike cost, power, size, supply
chain as sliders. You click abutton and then the platform's algorithms will look
(08:52):
at billions of component combinations against eachother and automatically connect those component at pull
down as the coupling while optimizing forcost, size, power, supply chain.
And then the output is a billof materials, schematic verification reports,
supply chain report, and also someother design assets for you. All of
(09:15):
that you can do in sixty tosix hundred seconds, so one minute to
ten minutes. And that's not themain value is solution exploration, which means
you shouldn't only get one answer.What are some of the data points you're
getting for the supply chain. Ifthat's a slider that people are prioritizing as
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far as, like you said,trade offs, if kind of sustainability of
supply chain or resiliency is a focus, how are you pulling that information?
So we pulled data from distributors,from manufacturers and their own APIs and aggregators.
So those three guys we pulled datafrom. So we have hundreds and
(10:00):
hundreds of distributors in our catalog andyou know, pretty much any manufacturer out
there or just pull that data fromthose three sources. And so I'll tell
you what people care a lot about. They have three things. The first
one is availability now or sometime inthe future in stock, and that could
be availability in stock in some distributorsor some set of distributors, or internally
(10:22):
with my procurementing, do we havestock Internet, So that's number one.
Number two is in terms of supplychain resilience. People care a lot about
alternates distributors, so I want toknow that once I start to develop this,
how many backup options are I goingto do I have? That's part
(10:43):
of resilience. And then number three, people care a lot about alternates,
as you know, and they aredifferent levels of alternates, but they want
to know that they can also backup a component, either we drop and
replaceable or other you know, classesof component alternatives. So those are the
three main things that we see peoplecaring about. There's also the fourth one,
(11:05):
which is life cycle, but lifecycle is less popular and more popular
amongst like larger companies with longer youknow, with machinery that's in the in
the in the field for a longertime period. Where you guys kind of
ad as far as stage of yourstartup, are you in testing? How
(11:26):
many users do you have active?What kind of scale of companies are you
working with, and what are kindof your next goals or next steps.
No, that's a great question.So where we are you know, to
understand where we are now, youhave to understand our journey. This is
not something that happened over night.I mean we were in research and development
for four and a half years.We close that first customer beginning of last
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year, and this is paying customerswho are professional engineers, managers and directors.
That's how we go to market.It's not a sort of more user
bas thing. It's a company andteam based thing, professional engineer based thing.
They have to be doing something valuable. Before we went to market,
we were actually doing design consultancy,so we were using the platform on designs
(12:16):
we're doing for others. And thenwe released to the first customer that was
using it themselves, you know,of last year, fast growth since then,
we're now working with customers in theEMS space, design services, industrial,
automotive, medical, consumer, Ican keep going on awesome, And
what would you say is the mostkind of competitive edge that you offer?
(12:39):
Obviously right now there's kind of thisrace to provide these tools. I think
there's a few, you know,different players in the arena at the moment.
Obviously, like the bigger companies arelooking out for startups they might acquire
or building these tools internally as well. So how would you say you kind
of differentiate with some of your competitors. I'm just pro anything that can help
(13:03):
in this space, because nothing's changedsince the nineties. Have at it,
everyone come in, have at it. We need to make changes in the
space. So I think the maincompetitor is in fact, sometimes when a
customer comes to me and we can'tdo what they want, for instance,
they want to do layout automation,I'd say, here are three companies that
(13:24):
you should go look at. I'mnot sure what their progress is, but
we don't do that. These guysdo that, right. So I'm very
excited about the opportunity that I thinkthe AI revolution has brought into this space.
So what we've spent our time doingis building that sort of real automation
(13:45):
for engineers. Our algorithms are deterministic, they're built with circuit design fundamentals at
their core and built to solve theproblems that we know are electronics engineers and
manager some directors have. And sothat's our focus, trying to pull people
away from the state of school tosee something not just new, but useful,
(14:09):
authentic, real. So on thatnote, what would you say are
some of the biggest challenges for gettingpeople to adopt and be open to this
kind of new technology if they areused to doing, you know, things
the same way that they've always doneit, a little more old school,
drafted by hand, et cetera.What's how do you kind of draw them
(14:31):
in? And you know, I'msure it's a little bit of the product
speaking for itself as you mentioned,but what have you found is kind of
the greatest hurdle in that process,The greatest hurdle you have to put.
You have to build something that hasa familiar user experience that fits into the
engineer's workflow. So our approach todoing that was you start with the block
(14:58):
diagram, which you start today.That's that's what you do. You have
the way of specifying your design intentand low level requirements feel similar to what
you're doing on Digiti, and whenyou're done, you export to Altium and
it's the same files that you havethat you build, so it plugs in,
(15:18):
you know, snugly into the workflow, right, And that was kind
of one of the ways we lookedat that challenge. And then the second
one, which I said before,but I think it's so crucial that I'll
repeat it. I'll repeat myself,is just value. It's got to do
something useful, whether that is makingyou them faster or in our case,
(15:41):
what I'm seeing the most is thisnew capability of solution exploration. Being number
one, I can optimize costs,size, power, different architectures very quickly.
I can get answers, insights boom, and it speeds me up because
now I have a schematic that itcan start from. Great. Now that
makes a lot of sense. Reallyhaving that reliability and that comfort level where
(16:03):
it's familiar, people aren't going tobe kind of turned off just at first
glance at what the process they haveto go through to implement the tool.
Despite our amazing conversation, we haveto take a quick break when we come
back, we'll look into how circuitMind can avoid future creep and how the
tool is used to aid professionals intheir designs, not replace them. Welcome
(16:33):
back to the Bomb engineering a pathforward. I'm your host, Magenta Strongheart.
When we left off to Meeta wasexplaining how to spite all of the
technological advancements in computing, most peopleare still stuck in the nineteen nineties when
it comes to designing circuit boards,and why he feels that the industry could
use a serious overhaul. We talkedto a lot of founders and engineers and
(16:57):
startups of course that talk about thechallenge of kind of avoiding feature creep and
how important that can be to thedevelopment process. And I'd love to hear
if you have any anecdotes or experiencesyou can speak to to things early on
that you guys maybe thought, wereyou know, integral to this tool or
solution that you know you realized quicklynot important for the endgame, or you
(17:18):
know, anything you're really attached to, you how to get rid of or
just from the development process you said, you know, you guys worked on
for four years really fine tuning thisto get to this point, and were
there any battles you and your cofounder had to go through to a keeper
lego of aspects of your tool.That's a great question. The first one.
The first thing that everything in thisparticular space for this particular problem,
(17:44):
it's all about scope. I mean, the vision is that you can do
so a lot in that design process, but you can't do it all by
yourself. So you have to narrowdown and narrow down until you get to
something that that you can kind ofdeliver. So the first thing that we
let go of was, oh,we're going to all sort of meet layouts,
(18:07):
you know, to start with.I mean, later on we can
work on that problem. But Ido see some really good companies coming out,
so you know, working on thatproblem. But you know, we
massively narrowed down and see and said, let's work on the problem between architect
schematic. It's a big problem onthe song, and so we started work.
You know, we kind of narrowedit down to that sort of front
(18:30):
end of the development process. Makessense. That's great. From the beginning,
you were focused, you knew whatyou had to avoid. Of course,
I think that you know something thata lot of people think about.
As you know, you mentioned.The AI evolution continues to develop and people
are seeing the impact. Is whatdoes this look like in the future.
(18:52):
Do you see the potential? Imean, you've talked through kind of what
foundation you need to have with theblock diagrams and the architecture going into your
design, and that need obviously ofan engineering foundation. Do you see the
potential of the future where industrial designers, for example, who have no engineering
experience, want to develop a designfor an electronics product they're interested in designing,
(19:15):
and would they be able to avoidentirely working with an engineer and be
able to split something out using atool like this. Do you see that
for the future? Is it reallya tool to supplement and enable and empower
the engineers that are already working onthese kinds of things. I think there
will be a split. You know, I'm just thinking about this now,
(19:36):
but I think there will be asplit. There will be tools like there
are todays that for makers and hobbyiststo do things faster and get prototypes and
you know, interesting things working insome fashion but not necessarily very reliably or
that you can put in the realproduct, right, So there will be
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things that enable makers, hobbyists andindustrial designers to do that. But those
will be very different from the toolsand the software that make an engineer that
today does five circuits, like askilled a professional engineer that does five circuits,
(20:18):
to be able to do five thousandcircuits, those two things will be
you know, will be different,right, two different tracks. Of course,
what we're building is the latter.We're building a tool to help a
person that knows circuit design principles todo five thousand because you still need your
(20:38):
experience to take that design forward.You still need to go from the standard
circuit to a reliable circuit for aspecific application. You still also need to
do the creative parts of the circuit, the more analogy ones that allow you
to need you to start from scratchalmost and it's just discrete, it's all
over the place, right, illgoing to need you know, your time,
(21:02):
effort and your mental energy to needto do all of that. So
our platform is for professional engineers tomassively kind of gain leverage. Right,
I can do five, six,seven, Now I can do one hundreds
totally, And I feel like alsowhat's important to that is what you mentioned
early on about the circuit mind helpingyou get a number of options very quickly,
(21:26):
and then you need to to youknow, determine, with your experience
and with your priorities for the specificproject or product, what is the right
option moving forward. So it's similarin a way, like we were this
is I don't know, maybe youwon't like this analogy, but I'll throw
it out there. Anyways, wewere talking with an interior designer who was
using mid Journey for brainstorming sketches.Basically, so he's using his own original
(21:52):
material, past furniture that he's createdand putting that into the tool of course,
and starting with that as the referencematerial, and then spinning out a
bunch of options, you know,based on some parameters he's put in.
But then he's going from that stageand editing down you know what I like,
what I want to continue working with, and then obviously there's a ton
more work to go into making thata real product, of course. And
(22:14):
so I thought that was a reallyinteresting way to think about, you know,
rather than I think a lot ofpeople go immediately to assume these tools
are replacing entire roles or processes,and actually they're really, just like you
said, helping scale them, helpingmake processes more efficient and kind of opening
up the bandwidth possibilities of everyone who'salready talented in the space. Of course,
(22:38):
I completely agree. Why'd you sayI wouldn't like that amalogy? I
don't know. People can be touchyabout their you know, their industry or
what they're talking about. Yeah,no, I love it. I mean
the analogy I give to people isthere are certain types of automation that just
create leverage for skilled workers. Socompilers create leverage for software engineers. The
(23:03):
value that software engineers could create wentthrough the roof, and so did their
salaries from the kind of nineties tillnow. Same thing with integrated circuit engineers.
When you were still doing a schematicmanually for a chip, you know
it took so long you couldn't createso much value for the company, and
(23:25):
so you know you were earning youknow something, Now you are creating chips
with billion dollar transistors because of synthesisand place around engines, and so I
see, engineers are incredibly valuable.We can make electronics, board level and
system level engineers as valuable as thosesort of jobs, but we have to
(23:48):
be able to give them leverage tobe able to create so much value for
their companies and their organizations that thosecompanies say, oh, well, if
I find one of these guys,I can get excellent number of products outs
to markets and that's going to increasemy revenue by so much. Boom,
I need this person, you know, five hundred K bonus compensation this year.
(24:11):
Everyone loves to hear that. Yeah, definitely throw that in there.
I do want to be mindful ofour time here. So I think we'll
kind of wrap up with a fewrapid fire questions, and first on that
list is going to be what's yourfavorite part of your job now that you've
taken on the role of co founder. I'm sure a lot's changed from some
of your previous experiences. What doyou love about what you're doing now?
(24:34):
Yeah, I love talking to peopleelectronics, engineers, managers, directors,
VP's view investors. I just lovetalking to people telling them about what I'm
passionate about. That's the favorite part. Awesome. Yeah, I think a
lot of people can relate to that. That's one of my favorite parts of
my job too, getting to talkto everyone who's super passionate about what they're
(24:57):
building and what they're working on inthis absolutely and so Our next one is
what's something outside of technology that's inspiringyou right now? Something outside of technology
that's inspiring me. Music. Idon't know if you watched the super Bowl,
but I think yes, the superBowl performance with the Usher, and
(25:22):
it's kind of renaissance. I lovethe sort of like comeback journey and it
just kind of gives me goosebumps totally. I thought you were going to say
the two new songs from Beyonce,but Usher was great too. Usher that's
great too. And Alicia Keys.Can't forget Alicia Keys. I feel like
she kind of stole the show alittle bit. But great. I don't
know if that's unpopular opinion. Awesome. And then last, but not least,
(25:45):
what is on your personal bill ofmaterials? Maybe music's top of the
list. Who knows my personal billof materials is? It's my laptop leave
me stranded, Key, I needa plug socket though, but with a
laptop, and I think it's justamazing that the sort of wonders you can
(26:11):
do. You can talk to anyonein the world, you can build incredible
things obviously software, so I thinkyou know, you know, laptop is
one of the greatest inventions. Awesome, and you may be surprised to know
that we actually haven't gotten that answeryet from any other guests. So that's
why I love that question. Italways inspires unique answers from everyone. It's
(26:33):
very much up to interpretation before wego. Would love to just give you
the opportunity if there's anything up andcoming you want to announce or share with
our community. I know you mentioneda webinar series and a few other events,
so feel free to shout them outnow, tell them more and we'll
definitely draw some links in the descriptionand show notes so people can access it
no problem. Yeah, so there'sa big one. So on the twenty
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ninth of February twenty twenty four.I know you could be watching this in
twenty twenty seven because the podcast isso successful, but definitely speak it into
existence. We're going to do ourfirst public showcase on demonstration of the circuit
led platform. I'll be showing theplatform, my co founder will be talking
(27:15):
about the algorithms that work in theplatform. You'll have a customer come and
talk about what they built on theplatform. I will have Q and A
from Zacharai Peterson, who seems tobe the face of kind of the electronic
engineer in the sort of like mediaspace right now. So he's a fantastic
guy. Looking forward to being quizzedby him, the voice of the engineer
(27:41):
kind of poking and prodding me.So that's going to happen again on the
twenty ninth of February twenty twenty four. You can register on the link in
the show notes, and you'll alsobe on demand with that same link,
so you can watch after that dateas well. Great, thank you so
(28:03):
much. We'll definitely, like Isaid, plug that in the show notes,
make it easy to find for folks. And looking forward to seeing where
circuit Mind goes in the future andmaybe we'll catch up again. And thanks
again for your insights on the kindof entrepreneur journey. I think our audience
will get a kick out of it. I appreciate your time, AGENTA and
thanksful giving me the opportunity to speakwith your audience. That was to meetay
(28:33):
out Asami and his vision for aworld where engineers can focus on the dream,
not on which micro controller they needto order. His amazing work has
the possibility to redefine what workflows canlook like in the near future. Take
a look at our show notes forTomy Day's upcoming events. This has been
The Bomb, engineering a path forward. If you like the Bomb, don't
(28:59):
forget to subscribe, vibrate and sharethe show. Wherever you get your podcasts.
You can follow supply Frame and Hackadayon Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn YouTube,
and design Lab at supply Frame DesignLab on Instagram and Twitter. The
Bomb is a supply Frame podcast producedby Me, Magenta Strongheart and Ryan Tillotson,
written by Maggie Bowles and edited byDaniel Ferrara. Theme music is by
Anna Hogman. Show art by ThomasSchneider. Special thanks to Giovanni Selinas,
(29:22):
Bruce Dimingez, Thomas Woodward, JinKumar, Jordan Clark, the entire supply
Frame team, and you are wonderfullisteners. I'm your host, Magenta Strongheart.
See you next week. What