SBIR Phase II: FlashPCB Service Commercialization and AI Component Package Identification

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project is to create an artificial intelligence-powered printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) service that allows new products to get to market faster and that allows engineers to develop more sophisticated designs by decreasing the time to iterate on PCBs designs. Prototyping PCBAs is a key element in the innovation process for all electronics from consumer goods to medical devices, but current PCBA prototyping services are limited by manual steps and supply chain shortages. The artificial intelligence innovation of this project will save the customers time through strategic automation, shortening innovation timelines, and bringing new products to market faster. Currently, other countries are still dominating the PCBA market share, serving many customers from the United States. There is an opportunity to provide high-quality, cost-competitive manufacturing in the United States to better serve the market and meet the rising demand for PCBAs. Additionally, investment in domestic manufacturing will strengthen electronic manufacturing capabilities, reduce dependence on foreign markets, and protect intellectual property. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will create a service that provides customers with a rapid PCBA prototyping service. The project employs computer vision and artificial intelligence techniques to ensure the manufacturability of customers’ designs and find components to satisfy the customers’ designs while ensuring the designs can be manufactured in a blistering three days. The project will automate many of the manual steps associated with quoting and manufacturing a PCBA. One of the most time-consuming steps of quoting a PCBA is determining a set of components that will satisfy a customer’s design and which can be sourced within the manufacturing time frame. Building on the component selection algorithm developed in the SBIR Phase I project, which reads the property text from the customer’s designs to find components that satisfy the customer’s specifications, will build a system for matching components to a footprint (the copper landing pad on the board onto which a component is soldered). This will allow for rapid quoting, component substitution, and manufacturability checks, all of which will make PCBA prototyping fast and easy for the customer. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.