#699 – CircuitHub, 12 Years Later with Andrew Seddon

Welcome Back, Andrew Seddon! Founder and CEO of CircuitHub.

• Andrew was first on episode 131 of The Amp Hour
• CircuitHub has a partnership with Worthington Assembly
• Worthington and CircuitHub host the Pick Place Podcast
• Mimicing silicon manufacturing
• Common parts library
• Setting the factory up to have only 50k SKUs in house for speed of loading / attrition
• Driving people to 2000 parts was the original intent, but didn’t hit the mark
• Level of production needs to be high
• Many parts need to work in conjunction
  • Reflow
  • PnP
  • Throughhole
  • Selective soldering
  • Inspection
• Need to solve for the whole setup. Making smt 10x better doesn’t make overall 10x better
• Starlink manufcaturing localy
• PCB fabs in the US, 50 left, getting rolled up under Private Equity (as are things like machine shops)
• AI with VCs
• How it impacts the electronics industries
• KiCad
• More AI stuff
• Automation on checking
• Still humans involved
• PDKs for chip companies
• File checking / JLC
• Types of customers
  • 10 largest companies on the planets
  • It’s individuals who order and try it out, that often becomes a repeat business thing
  • Customers / types of boards / size of orders
  • More startups who also want production
• Future serving lower cost areas
• Proto service 2-4 layer black soldermask (unlisted)
• See the CircuitHub capabilities
• Going high volume
• People making weekly or monthly units and spreading it out
• Spinning up custom in-house high volume
• Flattenting the price curve
• Tariffs
• New customers approaching them because of it
• Can consumer be done in the US?