From Product Brief to PCB: How AI is Revolutionizing Hardware Design in Under 30 Minutes

Artificial intelligence has moved beyond writing code—it's now designing the actual circuits that power our physical world. Flux, led by co-founder and CEO Matthias Wagner, is pioneering this transformation with AI agents that can turn product briefs into manufacturable printed circuit board (PCB) designs in under 30 minutes.

The Hardware Design Problem

Wagner's inspiration for founding Flux in 2019 came during a Burning Man project when he realized a striking disparity: while software development tools had evolved dramatically, hardware design tools remained virtually unchanged. "The tooling to make hardware had not improved in my lifetime… the tooling to make software is unrecognizable," Wagner observed. Despite supply chains evolving to allow individual manufacturing of almost anything, design tools hadn't kept pace.Flux initially built a browser-based, collaborative CAD tool from scratch, architected as a reinforcement learning environment for AI agents. The arrival of Large Language Models in 2022 "turbocharged" their vision, with Flux becoming one of the first engineering tools to integrate AI chat capabilities.

The AI Hardware Engineer in Action

During a live demonstration, Flux's AI designed a custom Alexa-like device complete with:

• ESP32 microcontroller
• Beamforming microphones
• OLED display
• Speaker and battery management
• Wi-Fi connectivity

The AI agent selected from millions of components, verified compatibility, generated a manufacturable design, and explained its decisions while accepting real-time user feedback. This collaborative approach represents a fundamental shift in hardware design methodology.

Key Takeaways:

• Speed Revolution: Flux transforms product briefs into complete PCB designs in under 30 minutes through autonomous AI agents
• Impressive Growth: The company has achieved 7,000 paying customers and 26x year-over-year growth entirely through organic channels
• Democratized Hardware: By eliminating high design costs, AI makes custom hardware as accessible as generating text, with material expenses as the only remaining barrier

The technical architecture layers multiple specialized agents using frameworks like LangGraph and LangChain, with agents managing everything from component selection to routing optimization. Users now expect end-to-end solutions, demanding complete designs from simple product briefs rather than incremental tool improvements.Wagner envisions a future where one could "prompt a smartphone into existence," fundamentally disrupting traditional OEM models and democratizing hardware creation at unprecedented scale.🔗 Read the full article on StartupHub.ai