San Francisco, CA – April 27th, 2022— Flux, the innovative browser-based PCB design tool, today announced a community preview of Flux Copilot: the industry’s first AI-powered hardware design assistant integrated into a PCB design tool. Flux Copilot marks a major milestone in the hardware industry as the first time that a powerful AI assistant is being used to augment the hardware design experience.
Flux is a browser-based PCB design tool that innovatively solves many of the industry’s largest challenges by enabling unprecedented collaboration and ease of design through cloud-hosted and community-shared design resources. With the introduction of Flux Copilot, Flux is now raising the bar even further by being the first PCB design tool in the industry to offer users an AI design assistant.
Flux Copilot is a custom-trained large language model (LLM) that lives inside of your project and can provide direct feedback, advice, and analysis regarding hardware design. Flux Copilot understands your schematic design, including the components you used, how they’re connected, and all part information from datasheets. With this information and a deep wealth of knowledge on Electrical Engineering principles, Flux Copilot uses conversational AI to help designers select parts and understand their compatibility, provides feedback on schematic designs, and performs design analysis. Other features include assistance in evaluating component alternates, cost-down analysis of designs, and electrical rule checks (ERCs).
Since Flux Copilot lives in your comments, it’s a truly collaborative tool. By simply asking Flux Copilot for information through a text interface, designers gain access to an endless wealth of knowledge to assist in the design process. The result is that the barrier to entry for hardware
designs has been significantly reduced, allowing engineers to produce higher quality hardware designs in shorter amounts of time and at less cost than ever before.
Like a personal design expert at your disposal, Flux Copilot is meant as a tool to augment the hardware design experience of the Electrical Engineer. The LLM does not guarantee 100% accuracy in its responses at the time of launch, so Flux Copilot is to be viewed as a guide for the designer and not as a substitute for the designer’s judgment or expertise.
Beyond its purpose for professional Electrical Engineers, Flux Copilot also opens up educational opportunities for different groups of users such as students and Operations Engineers. For example, an Operations Engineer can improve their productivity by asking Flux Copilot “Please find me a drop-in replacement for component U1”. A student can use Flux Copilot to learn circuit design principles by asking “Please explain the function of U1 in this circuit. ”
“At Flux, our goal has always been to democratize hardware design by taking the ‘hard’ out of ‘hardware.’ And a major reason that hardware is so hard is that there are so many barriers to entry associated with the design process. With Flux Copilot we’re removing these barriers in a
major way, providing engineers with their own personal design expert to use at their disposal,” noted Matthias Wagner, CEO of Flux. “Hardware design has never been as easy or accessible as it is today with Copilot!”
This news comes on the heels of Flux’s recent move out of private beta and into public launch in February. Flux Copilot is currently available for free preview to all Flux users, with eventual plans to allow access to the feature through a monthly subscription fee. Future plans for Flux
Copilot include the addition of features such as allowing it to take the actions it suggests and to improve the accuracy of the LLM for even greater results.
About Flux
Flux is a browser-based end-to-end electronic design tool that breaks down barriers in the hardware design industry. By offering an integrated workflow, reusable blocks, and access to modern collaboration, Flux’s PCB design tool marks a paradigm shift in the hardware industry. For the past two years, Flux has existed only in a private beta, within which over 25,000 engineers have signed up for the beta. Flux exited private beta and has been available for public use since February of 2023.
