DesignAdvance's first product, CircuitSpace, automates the manual process of circuit board component placement, reducing design time and pushing products to market sooner at reduced cost.

The heart and brain of telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics is the printed circuit board (PCB)—highly complex configurations of components that require extremely precise placement. Until now, the best way to design these boards—some with as many as 10,000 components—was a time-consuming manual process.

"We have removed the last barrier to optimizing computer-based design of PCBs—time," states Randy Eager, CEO and co-founder of the Pittsburgh-based DesignAdvance Systems, Inc. "Component placement accounts for about 50% of the time it takes to design a circuit board. We've created a user-assisted tool to automate the last step in PCB design that needed to be automated."

DesignAdvance, a spinout of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), is an EDA/MCAD company with a software solution that automates three-dimensional design processes. The company's first product, CircuitSpace, automates the manual process of PCB component placement, reducing design time and pushing products to market sooner at reduced costs.

CircuitSpace is currently installed at several Fortune 100 companies and is rapidly gaining acceptance, particularly in the telecom industry, where effective, efficient PCB design is critical to profitability. It dramatically shaves the time it takes to create such complex circuit board designs as internet switches, routers, computer mother boards and blade servers.

According to Eager, previous attempts to automate the component placement process failed because they tried to place everything at the same time. "What are the odds of getting 10,000 components placed precisely on a board all at once? It's not sustainable. Our tool breaks the process down into steps, automates each step along the way and allows the designer to influence the outcome to meet precise standards."

“The first time we presented our business model to BFTP, we were focused on automotive applications, and we didn't get funded. They encouraged us to focus on the single most profitable application.” —Randy Eager, CEO, DesignAdvance

As so often is the case, what starts out as research in a university lab goes through a reality check in the marketplace.

Jonathan Cagan, DesignAdvance co-founder and professor of mechanical engineering at CMU, was already receiving funding from automotive companies who were looking for a way to use his automated 3-D packaging technology to improve the design process for engine compartments, trunks and transmissions. Engineers at Ford and General Motors validated the design need, but in 2002, with the industry in the doldrums, precious funds were not being spent on new CAD tools.

"The first time we presented our business model to BFTP, we were focused on automotive applications, and we didn't get funded," recalls Eager, who first encountered BFTP when he was working in the technology transfer office at CMU. "One of the slides in our presentation noted a PCB application, but we hadn't completed our own due diligence at that point, so we did not yet have the confidence to switch focus. The feedback received from BFTP was to focus on the single most profitable application and market."

Eager then connected with Compunetics—a Monroeville-based producer of audio and video teleconferencing systems and a printed circuit board design and manufacturing company—to further explore the possibilities of augmenting DesignAdvance's technology for the PCB market.

"We spent some time refining the algorithms in our software for this market, and before we knew it, Compunetics was ready to invest in us," Eager recalls. "Having a future customer willing to invest money in you speaks volumes. We knew we were onto something."

Eager went back to BFTP, this time with a more targeted presentation focused on the commercial potential in the printed circuit board market—and it worked. In addition to providing three investments totaling $450,000, BFTP portfolio executive Jim Jen put his Silicon Valley software management experience to work.

"Jim was like gold to us," Eager says. "We figured out the tech side, but he taught us the art of product management. Along with the product development skills of Jonathan, we were able to create a world-class piece of software. I had never heard of a 'market requirements document' before I met him. It's all second nature now."

In February, DesignAdvance closed on a $3 million round of funding led by renowned venture capitalist firm Spencer Trask. Also in February, CircuitSpace received top honors at the Second Annual International Engineering Consortium (IEC) DesignVision Awards—a prestigious recognition of technologies judged to be the most unique and beneficial to the industry.

The recent accolades and infusion of cash has DesignAdvance poised for tremendous growth. "The need for more efficient PCB design is tremendous, and we have developed the solution," Eager notes. "Now that the technology is in place, we've added veteran EDA sales, support and marketing staff, and are focused on growing this company into a highly valuable enterprise."

 From the March/April 2006 issue