Circuit Mind ACE

Circuit Mind Limited is a London-based electronics design automation company. It tackles the time electronic engineers spend turning a system architecture into a detailed schematic and bill of materials, and the redesign work caused by component cost, availability and lifecycle changes.

Its platform, ACE, takes requirements expressed as an architecture or block diagram and generates complete electronic systems in seconds to minutes, optimising for cost, size, power, function, availability, performance and lifecycle. Each generated design comes with a schematic, BoM, verification checks, form factor and area analysis, and reports for power analysis, FMECA, stress and derating, and interface control documents. Schematics and libraries export to ECAD tools, including Cadence System Capture with PSpice validation. Users shown on the site include BAE Systems, National Instruments, Legrand, Design 1st, APAG CoSyst and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

• Architecture-to-schematic: generates full schematics from block diagrams and requirements.
• Multi-objective optimisation: balances cost, size, power, availability and lifecycle.
• Automatic BoM: produces a bill of materials alongside every design option.
• Engineering reports: power analysis, FMECA, stress and derating, and ICD outputs.
• Verification checks: deep checks and form factor and area analysis on each design.
• ECAD export: schematic and library export, including Cadence System Capture and PSpice.

A Vietnamese electronics design service company can produce several schematic and BoM options for a client brief within a day. An industrial equipment maker can redesign a controller board around parts that are available from regional distributors. A defence or aerospace supplier can generate FMECA and derating documents automatically.

Engineering teams can generate and compare complete schematic options in minutes instead of days of manual capture. Optimisation against cost, availability and lifecycle reduces redesigns caused by component shortages. Automatically produced FMECA, derating and power reports cut documentation effort for regulated or high-reliability products. In a published Los Alamos National Laboratory case study, design time for a medium-difficulty board fell from a typical 60 to 80 hours to about 4 hours.

Component shortages and fast product cycles have made re-spins and second-sourcing a constant burden for hardware teams. Generative and rules-based AI for electronics design aims to shorten the schematic phase and keep BoMs resilient. As Vietnam and Southeast Asia move up from assembly into product design, local engineering teams need tools that raise productivity per engineer.

Circuit Mind Limited is headquartered at the Metal Box Factory, 30 Great Guilford Street, London. Its website lists backing from Deeptech Labs, an accelerator funded by Arm, and non-dilutive funding from the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund. ACE was publicly unveiled in February 2024.