Just in Time Electronics

EECS Colloquium

Wednesday, April 10, 2019

306 Soda Hall (HP Auditorium)
4:00 – 5:00 pm

Jonathan Bachrach

Creative Director, JITX
Adjunct Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley

Abstract

Low-cost fully automated manufacturing is bringing about a new industrial revolution. Bespoke objects can be built with costs approaching volume production. But while we can manufacture bespoke objects at scale, we still cannot design them at scale. Design is now the bottleneck. Automating design will make design more accessible and produce better than human results and combined with unit production will both reduce waste, produce products that we more fully cherish, and help advance science and the welfare of humanity.  This will usher in a world where design and fabrication can happen at the speed of ideas, where every purchase can be a new design, where people without engineering degrees can design high quality objects, and where we can harness the power of parallel computing in the cloud to discover entirely new design possibilities.  Engineers can record their design intent succinctly and directly, rapidly explore a myriad of variants, optimize over the entire system, maintain a singular design spec throughout the entire product lifetime all resulting in dramatic increases in design speed and quality of results.  The vision of JITX (or Just In Time Everything) (YCS18) is to fully automate hardware design. Our first step is to automate circuit board design.  We are a profitable seed-stage startup, backed by Y Combinator and Sequoia.  We already have a fully automated end to end design flow for low speed embedded circuits and are expanding into higher speeds, power and complexities.  In this talk, I will present our vision, early results, fun computational challenges, and next steps.

Biography

Jonathan Bachrach is an adjunct assistant professor at UC Berkeley where he researches spatial, parallel and unconventional programming languages, computing and robotics. Before UC Berkeley, he cofounded Other Lab where he researched programmable matter and geometry workflows for fabrication, and before Other Lab, he was a research scientist at MIT for 8 years, held postdocs at Stanford and ICSI, and was a researcher at IRCAM in Paris, developing new musical platforms. He studied cognitive science, computer science, and visual arts, receiving a BS degree from the University of California at San Diego and MS and PhD degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.