[HN Gopher] JITX (YC S18) launches general availability and anno...
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JITX (YC S18) launches general availability and announces Series A
from Sequoia
Author : DHaldane
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-09-20 15:52 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.jitx.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.jitx.com)
| robbles wrote:
| This looks really cool, and I would love to try it out on a hobby
| project before considering it for something more serious.
|
| Are you planning to make some kind of "hobby" tier below the
| startup pricing at a later date?
| DHaldane wrote:
| We are - there will be a free offering for hobbyists soon.
| m-hilgendorf wrote:
| We have some code examples, for anyone that wants to see what a
| software-driven design looks like!
|
| https://docs.jitx.com/tutorials/quickstart-1.html
|
| https://docs.jitx.com/getting-started/example-design.html
| tomas789 wrote:
| How does this differ from VHDL? Is it in principle something
| different?
| DHaldane wrote:
| It's similar to VHDL in that Synposys came out with Design
| Compiler in the 80s, and people switched from drawing
| schematics to writing code to design electronics.
|
| From a language perspective it's quite different. VHDL has
| super-limited semantics to make it easier to synthesize. JITX
| is embedded in a general purpose programming language, which
| makes it more productive to write, and capable of describing
| all the weird little details that need to be handled for board
| design.
| [deleted]
| karmicthreat wrote:
| I keep wanting to try this out, but man do they put up road
| blocks. Skidl + kicad cover the programatic schematic entry part
| kind of.
| DHaldane wrote:
| Founder here! JITX today is pretty tightly positioned at a
| group of professional folks that find it very valuable. We'll
| be opening up more fully later this year, and we'll relaunch
| then with some pretty jaw dropping stuff.
| krasin wrote:
| JITX (and the general idea of schematics / PCB generators) is one
| of big challengers to the way hardware is designed.
|
| I hope they succeed. They easier it is to make new hardware, the
| more competition is, the better products we get as consumers.
| philsnow wrote:
| Am I understanding correctly, this is kind of like code
| generation (which is roughly a compiler that takes some sugared
| language and produces unsugared code that's usually incredibly
| ugly / indecipherable), but the input is some sugared language
| and the output is board designs?
|
| Do the board designs you output look alien / weird to people who
| have been laying out boards by hand / with conventional EDA
| tools? If so, is it causing any resistance to JITX adoption?
|
| A common creature comfort requirement for anything that
| transpiles / codegens, is source maps so that while debugging you
| can see the lines of code that _you(r team)_ typed, rather than
| harder-to-read generated code. Have you thought of trying to
| bring that concept to JITX?
|
| Super interesting, thanks for posting this.
| DHaldane wrote:
| Code generation is a good analogy - nice high-level code in,
| CAD design out. The 'sugaring' is implemented in a macro system
| that generates an Intermediate representation we designed for
| electrical systems (kinda like LLVM for hardware).
|
| JITX only produces weird-looking designs when they are provably
| correct and of high-performance. You can't throw an
| indecipherable mess to an EE and ask them to spend time
| understanding it. That's just not a productive way to design.
| There's a lot of work we do to make a design legible, including
| generating a schematic for the user to read.
|
| Yes! Our 'source-maps' connect the generated design checks,
| board, and schematic back to the originating line of code. So
| the user sees the output they are familiar with (e.g.
| schematic), and can trace it back to the line of code it came
| from. Collaboration in a team happens more at the source-code
| level, and we make sure that the same CAD design gets generated
| when that code is run.
| philsnow wrote:
| Thanks, this is amazing work!
| gaze wrote:
| Is schematic entry where most of the effort and complexity is
| when doing board design? Will JITX address the layout part of the
| design pipeline as well down the line?
| kanwisher wrote:
| Looks super cool to bad no remote roles
| Archit3ch wrote:
| I will be monitoring this and hope they succeed.
| gswdh wrote:
| Looks awesome and for sure will be the future. Most ECAD software
| has a circuit 'library' function you can design something once
| and use it many times so it's not completely fair to claim that's
| something really novel.
| wizwit999 wrote:
| Like CDK for circuit boards, sounds pretty cool.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Launch HN: JITX (YC S18) - Automating Circuit Board Design_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654865 - July 2018 (54
| comments)
| tmitchel2 wrote:
| Hoping for the following:
|
| - Fully automated place and routing up to 3d PCB level, with
| constraints including locked item positions, orientations and
| board stackup. Most likely ML based and fairly quick and trained
| on a simulator that takes into account various design rules,
| realistic physics, etc . Zero input from a GUI.
|
| - Datasheet semantics implemented directly into code / logic and
| rules checking and analog simulation
|
| - Use typescript, jsx to create the simplest way to implement
| components and sub circuits. (I know this isn't going to happen)
|
| - Use a cloud package manager so people can share thier sub
| circuits and ICs
|
| - Interactive heirarcical schematic
| krasin wrote:
| Generally in agreement, but two minor questions:
|
| > Use typescript, jsx to create the simplest way to implement
| components and sub circuits. (I know this isn't going to
| happen)
|
| I can see why not many people would be willing the learn a new
| language from JITX (stanza?), but why typescript/jsx instead of
| python?
|
| > Use a cloud package manager so people can share thier sub
| circuits and ICs
|
| Why not just a github repository? Kind of like
| https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs
| tmitchel2 wrote:
| Personal preference but I would say typescript because,
| performance is not overly a concern when doing something like
| infrastructure as code, great static type checking /
| development integration already provided when using something
| like vscode and lastly because it has jsx / tsx....And so why
| jsx, I know that designing a circuit is more akin to a graph
| data structure and jsx is really more suited to a tree data
| structure but if you can get over that by defining your nets
| separately up above the components in the jsx structure then
| I feel like you can really harness a lot of the benefits that
| jsx brings to regular UI design. Again this is personal and
| I've mucked about with this very thing a bit myself.
|
| Im not familiar with pulling a github repo to get at a
| package, if it allows anybody to make their circuits publicly
| available, forkable, etc then all good..
| tmitchel2 wrote:
| BTW definitely wouldnt recommend jsx it for something like
| a digital design / verilog replacement. Hard for me to
| reason even to myself why I would treat that differently to
| discrete component domain...
| yaseer wrote:
| This is a really technologically interesting problem to solve,
| congrats!
|
| The GitHub analogy is particularly captivating.
|
| The potential for applying code re-use and other programming
| principles in hardware could create a 'Cambrian explosion' of
| activity there.
|
| I'll be monitoring this with some excitement!
| noncoml wrote:
| You know an idea is great when it makes you say, "How didn't I
| think of it!"
|
| Godspeed JITX
| eatonphil wrote:
| Nice work, congrats!
| 650REDHAIR wrote:
| I'm not an EE, but I've heard plenty of horror stories over the
| last 2 years where a component is unavailable and an entire new
| design needs to be configured with new available components only
| for the redux to take too long and components are unavailable
| again...
|
| Can someone smarter than me tell me if jitx solves that problem?
| DHaldane wrote:
| Don't know that I'm at all smarter, but I have some domain
| knowledge. Yes, JITX makes it easier to source/design in
| replacement components and the circuits around them.
|
| It's a major use cases these days with all the churn coming
| from supply chain volatility.
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