Open Flux now, switch Copilot to “Next-gen” and see how it handles your next design challenge. The sooner you try it, the more your feedback can shape the next leap in AI-powered hardware design.
Testing plays a major role in minimizing errors during mass production, yet creating thorough test plans can be challenging and time-consuming.. That’s why we're excited to introduce AI-generated test plans and collaborative workflows, ensuring your hardware is manufactured error-free!
The first challenge is identifying which aspects of the prototype need testing. Just because a prototype functions correctly doesn't guarantee it's ready for mass manufacturing. Certain signals that appear stable in prototype testing might fall out of spec under the stresses of mass production. Identifying and correcting these discrepancies early is crucial. Resolving errors discovered at the mass manufacturing stage can be exceedingly costly..
Copilot understands the detailed interplay between all the components in your design and has expert-level knowledge of electronics fundamentals. It uses this expertise to identify which signals are most critical and which are likely to fail based on conventional EE concepts and the specifics of your design.
Now Copilot has helped you understand which signals to keep an eye on. But still, the question remains: how do I go about testing my signals? This is where a well-detailed test plan comes into play.
Some of the most important questions to address in a test plan include
Copilot helps your team answer all of these questions by developing comprehensive and robust test plans for your design. Simply prompt Copilot with a question like
With a comprehensive test plan, your team can ensure that any design errors get caught early in the process and well before you go to production. This means your team can spend less time correcting errors and less money on unnecessary design revisions. Ultimately, that translates to higher quality products and faster time to market.
Once you’ve executed the test plan, you’ll need to interpret your results and solve any design issues that have been revealed.
You can directly provide Copilot with the results from your test. For example, you can attach a screenshot of your oscilloscope’s capture to give it more context. Your prompt might then look something like this
Flux not only streamlines the testing and debugging process but also enhances the way test engineers and designers collaborate on projects. By integrating collaboration within the design tool, Flux ensures that all team members have real-time access to test data, design changes, and analytical insights. This seamless integration allows for immediate feedback loops and faster decision-making, which is crucial when addressing complex design challenges
With Flux, your team can swiftly move from identifying issues to implementing solutions, accelerating the development cycle and enhancing overall productivity.
Don’t let a clunky testing and debug workflow lead to product failures. Flux can help you streamline the process so that your team can bring high-quality products to market in less time and at a lower cost without sacrificing quality.
Want to learn more about how Flux can help revolutionize hardware design? Sign up for Flux today.
With Flux, enterprises can take their architectural ideas and use AI to transform those ideas into actionable items. With Copilot, your enterprise can generate schematics, perform AI design reviews, and even identify PCB technology, budgets, and timelines well in advance of any manufacturing.
At this point, your team has a block diagram. Still, your project is mostly abstract. The Component and Technology Selection phase is where things start to get tangible. With a detailed block diagram as the phases’ input, it's time to start selecting components and putting a real system together.
With Flux, your team can use AI to expedite everything in this phase, from component selection and design review to cost estimation and sourcing.
Let’s discuss how AI can take your team’s architectural ideas and help them select components and identify core technologies.
The first step in this phase is to start selecting components, and that’s one place where Copilot really shines. Copilot is guided by your company’s guidelines, including regulatory requirements, pricing, power consumption, operating conditions, and more. With these parameters defined in a Template, Copilot finds the best components that fit your specific project requirements.
Start by providing Copilot with your architecture as a block diagram and asking:
@copilot, here’s my system block diagram. What major components will be necessary to make it work?
Right off the bat, Copilot can provide clarity, insight, and direction to your project by identifying the major components and subsystems necessary for your project. Maybe your system needs an MCU and numerous sensors. Or maybe a single, highly integrated SoC can meet your needs. Copilot will provide options and specific component possibilities to help you make these decisions.
Copilot will also make sure that you have many options. To get a breadth of options and achieve greater design flexibility, just ask Copilot:
@copilot, please provide me multiple component options for each different block in my diagram
By analyzing vast databases of technical specifications and performance metrics, Copilot can help your team choose the most suitable components based on your unique needs for performance, cost, and supplier reliability.
If supply or cost becomes an issue, Copilot can help your team compare parts and evaluate potential alternatives. Just ask Copilot:
@copilot, could you please provide me with drop-in replacement alternates for U1?
Copilot can evaluate multiple parts and alternatives for the same component, comparing manufacturer availability so that you can guarantee your design will withstand the challenges of a volatile supply chain.
Copilot also aids the business side of things. With access to Flux’s native cost estimation tools that help project your BOM’s cost, Copilot can provide your team with a comprehensive understanding of the project’s financial aspects from the outset. With Flux’s real-time integration with manufacturer databases, your team can access real-time pricing and availability data to ensure that your components are under budget and easily sourced.
With Copilot’s help, at the end of the component selection phase, you should have yourself a high-level schematic diagram.
Once you have a schematic, it’s time to double-check your work. Flux Copilot can use your requirements to perform an initial review of the first schematic draft, identifying potential design inefficiencies, compatibility issues, and areas for optimization.
One aspect of this is component validation, where Copilot can help ensure that your components are interoperable, based on requirements like voltage range, communication interfaces, and clock speeds. For example, ask Copilot:
Copilot will then read through your parts datasheets, review their schematic interconnections, and provide you feedback on their interoperability.
Architectural validation is where Copilot can review the block diagram generated in the previous step and validate that the core components selected match the target use case. For example, you can ask Copilot:
@copilot, here's the block diagram I've created and here is my schematic. Do things match up?
Or, Copilot can help evaluate candidate parts to match the project’s requirements and standards, including your organization-specific standards. For example, if your project is operating under a tight power requirement, you could ask Copilot:
@copilot, does my schematic meet my power requirements?
Copilot will read datasheets and interpret your schematic to estimate the system’s power consumption. It can then offer suggestions to help lower the power consumption, if necessary.
Once the schematic has been reviewed and ironed out, your engineers and product team must work together to define the project’s path forward. From the engineering side, you’ll want to identify the PCB technology requirements to make such a system work.
While your team is still early on in the design process, this kind of foresight can help you create accurate and realistic timelines and budgets for your project. At this point, Copilot knows all of your project requirements and has context for all of your core components. With this knowledge, Copilot can help your team get a feel for the project’s necessary investment concerning development time, costs, and revisions. The engineering and product teams can be aligned on the project outlook and understand the steps necessary to bring your product to market.
For example, based on the design requirements and constraints, Flux Copilot can recommend the most suitable PCB technologies for your project. By taking into consideration factors like layer count, material, and manufacturing capabilities, Copilot can make sure that your team is working towards a manufacturable design from the very beginning. Ask Copilot a question like:
@copilot, given this schematic, roughly what’s the ideal stack up for my PCB design?
With Flux, enterprises can take their architectural ideas and use AI to transform those ideas into actionable items. With Copilot, your enterprise can generate schematics, perform AI design reviews, and even identify PCB technology, budgets, and timelines well in advance of any manufacturing.
Want to learn more about how Flux’s AI can help revolutionize hardware design? Sign up for Flux today.
With Copilot, the brainstorming process is easy. Given your requirements, just prompt Copilot and it will dynamically generate and evaluate architectural variations, balancing technical specifications and regulatory requirements in real time.
At Flux, we envision a different approach. Flux transforms architectural design by leveraging AI to rapidly generate and evaluate a wider range of options against your specific product requirements, ensuring a more effective selection process that leads to optimal outcomes. Here’s how:
To begin, you can simply have a conversation with Copilot about what you intend to build using as much information as you know. Copilot can use your requirements and constraints to explore many different architectural ideas and variations quickly.
You can also start with a Copilot Template with your design requirements objectives, constraints and regulatory aims, Copilot will use these guardrails to help find the best architectural solution that fits within your enterprise’s unique requirements. The more Copilot knows about what you want to build, the smarter architectural design recommendations it can make.
Simply add properties to your project like operating voltage and temperature, human interface, connectivity, and power requirements to give Copilot more context. Feel free to check out the full list of project requirements we used in this Audio Amplifier example.
For example, you can ask Copilot something like
@copilot, I'd like to build a smart curtain that opens or closes based on the amount of sunshine I want to enter my room. How would you approach designing this? Please ask me questions to help with the development?
If you already have ideas and need help brainstorming, communicating with Copilot is intuitive and flexible. Already started working on a whiteboard sketch? Prefer working with figures and block diagrams? Just send Copilot images of your block diagrams or sketches and watch it convert them into actionable specifications and feedback.
With Copilot, the brainstorming process is easy.
Given your requirements, just prompt Copilot and it will dynamically generate and evaluate architectural variations, balancing technical specifications and regulatory requirements in real time. For example, you could ask Copilot
@copilot, based on my requirements, help me figure out the best power architecture for this project. What should the power tree look like?
or
@copilot, brainstorm a few architecture options for this project. Compare all options in terms of total BoM cost and time to market. Particularly consider: Should I use modules or standalone MCUs?
Watch as Copilot transforms your requirements into detailed, actionable architectures and block diagrams. This direct translation from concept to plan streamlines the initial step of architectural design, ensuring your ideas are grounded in reality from the outset. And the automation of the process allows Copilot to generate multiple architectural solutions for you to choose from. This breadth of exploration ensures that every possible avenue is considered.
You can create a block diagram by asking Copilot something like
@copilot, please create a mermaid-formatted block diagram for this architecture.
Copilot can then help you in iterating on your design. Think of working with Copilot as a natural, free-flowing conversation. Working with Copilot in a back-and-forth feedback loop is the best way to ensure the optimal final result.
For real examples of using Copilot of brainstorm and generate architecture options, check out these project demos:
Copilot’s outputs improve the hardware design process significantly. But still, you and your team will want to evaluate your options and decided on the best path forward.
Flux's environment is designed for collaboration, enabling multiple stakeholders to engage in the architectural drafting process simultaneously. With built in-project commenting, everyone in your organization can share their thoughts and see the feedback of others. That way, the whole team is on the same page and all ideas are taken into consideration. And, with automatic version control, your team is free to experiment and iterate on different approaches, knowing that no idea is ever lost.
If you needed more support, you can bring Copilot back into the loop as a design review partner. Ask Copilot to review your chosen architecture, make suggestions, and offer improvements.
What’s more - by embedding the architecture directly into the design tool, Flux ensures that these foundational decisions guide and inform all subsequent stages, from component selection to detailed design, keeping critical information accessible and actionable throughout the project lifecycle.
Using Flux, enterprises can integrate AI into their workflows, making for better decision-making, reduced risk of error, and faster times to ship products. With the ability to adhere to your requirements and specifications, generate multiple architectural options, and bring together multiple stakeholders, Flux is reimagining the architecture design process.
Want to learn more about how Flux can help revolutionize hardware design? Sign up today.
Hardware just got a little less hard. See how Flux reduces busy work, keeps your team in sync, and gives you AI superpowers.
Today, we're thrilled to unveil a video that tells the story of that vision and the exciting future we're building together. We interviewed real Flux users — real professional Electrical Engineers — to showcase the power of Flux and Copilot. The reactions we got were priceless. You can practically see the lightbulbs clicking on in their heads.
We’d like to thank our community for sharing their amazing stories and joining us on this journey to take the hard out of hardware!
Onward and Upward 🚀,
Matthias & Lance
We're excited to reveal a major upgrade - Flux Copilot is transitioning from being a helpful guide to a proactive partner. It no longer just advises but, with your approval, can now wires components together! This is a small step towards fully generative AI, reducing the time and complexity often associated with component connections.
Last month we launched Flux Copilot, the industry’s first AI-powered hardware design assistant integrated into a PCB design tool. The innovative ways in which you’ve employed it to brainstorm, debug, conduct part research, and answer project-specific queries have truly amazed us. To celebrate this, we've compiled a page featuring all our favorite Flux Copilot prompts.
Today, we're excited to reveal a major upgrade - Flux Copilot is transitioning from being a helpful guide to a proactive partner. It no longer just advises but, with your approval, can now wires components together! This is a small step towards fully generative AI, reducing the time and complexity often associated with component connections.
Imagine working on a complex electronic circuit project, only to realize that you're not entirely sure how to connect the components. With the upgraded Flux Copilot, you can now simply ask,
@copilot, how would I connect these parts to make the LED flash at 1kHz?
Instead of just providing advice, Flux Copilot gives you the option to wire it up for you, saving you significant time and reducing the tedious parts of the hardware design process.
Dealing with a complex circuit and unsure about connecting components such as the RP2040 and SPI TFT LCD? No need to spend hours poring over datasheets to figure out which pins are capable of what. Simply ask,
@copilot, how should I connect U1 and U2?
where U1 and U2 are reference designators (REFDES) of RP2040 and TFT LCD in the schematic editor, respectively.
Just watch as Copilot smartly wires up your components in the schematic editor. Discover how to construct an RPi-pico-like board in just 20 minutes using Flux Copilot in this tutorial!
High-speed design is often a daunting domain, requiring specialized knowledge. There are a whole host of these requirements that make impedance control difficult to implement. Flux Copilot makes it as straightforward as any other design. Ask,
@copilot, how would I connect these two HDMI connectors as a pass through?
and allow Flux Copilot to establish the advised connections. Then, route your high-speed traces as usual. Flux takes care of all impedance control and calculations, allowing you to concentrate on the broader design. Learn more about high speed design with Flux.
To make the most of Flux Copilot, remember these key tips:
This is just one small step towards our vision of taking the hard out of hardware, and we couldn’t do it without your participation and feedback. We’re particularly excited about empowering individuals to iterate faster with Flux Copilot, using it like a senior electrical engineer that’s always there to brainstorm solutions, debug circuits, and discuss challenges with you.
We can't wait for you to experience the new and improved Flux Copilot and discover the difference it can make in your projects. Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions on Slack.
We're excited to see the incredible designs you create!
Best,
Matthias Wagner
Effortlessly enhance your electronic product development with Flux Copilot, the innovative design assistant by Flux. With features like schematic feedback, component selection, and design analysis, Flux Copilot leverages the power of AI to accelerate innovation, save costs, and avoid mistakes in your PCB design process.
In this blog post, we will explore the revolutionary features and insights offered by Flux Copilot, showcasing how it can transform hardware design and empower engineers to create innovative and reliable electronic products.
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.
At the heart of Flux Copilot is a Flux-trained large language model (LLM) that resides within your project, providing a wide array of functionalities to assist engineers in their design process. Copilot can be queried through comments or chat, offering a convenient and intuitive way to interact with the AI-powered assistant. Let's take a closer look at some of the capabilities of Flux Copilot:
The integration of Flux Copilot into the hardware design process offers several benefits that can revolutionize the way engineers approach their designs. Let's take a look at some of the key benefits of using Flux Copilot:
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.”
Like with any other tool, mastering Copilot takes some practice. To get the most relevant and valuable suggestions, make sure you follow these best practices:
"What components do I need to connect a 30w speaker to this U1?"
"Are there any alternatives to this part that have better availability?"
"I have U1 with these pins and these other parts - how do I connect them?"
"Have I connected things correctly?"
"Do I really need this resistor? I'm trying to save money. Are there cheaper versions of the components I'm using?"
"How much power does this IC can deliver?"
Flux Copilot, the industry's first AI-powered hardware design assistant integrated into a PCB design tool, offers a wide array of capabilities that can revolutionize the way engineers approach hardware design. With its ability to understand schematic designs, component lists, connections, and part information from datasheets, Copilot can provide valuable insights, suggestions, and feedback to streamline the design process, optimize designs, and enhance overall efficiency. From generating new ideas and exploring design options to validating calculations, offering tailored suggestions, and simplifying procurement, Copilot can empower engineers to create innovative and reliable electronic products. With its integration with Flux's community-created parts and components library and its ability to facilitate collaboration, Copilot is a game-changer in the field of hardware design. Embracing the power of AI in hardware design through Flux Copilot can unlock new possibilities, accelerate innovation, and drive the advancement of the electronics industry.
Ready to experience the power of Flux Copilot? Head to the Flux Copilot documentation page to learn more about its features, functionalities, and how to integrate it into your workflow.
