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By Davide Asnaghi, Co-Founder & CEO

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The Problem

A few years ago, my co-founder Lenny and I taped out custom silicon at TSMC. It was a complicated mixed-signal ASIC, and — against all statistical odds — it powered up flawlessly on day one. The printed-circuit board that hosted that miracle chip? Two unconnected nets, one flipped footprint, and a thermal relief that never relieved. That disconnect still blows my mind. Modern semiconductor toolchains can verify billions of transistors, yet the software that routes copper on a postcard-sized fiberglass slab can’t protect engineers from simple blunders. We realized the bottleneck in hardware innovation wasn’t Moore’s Law; it was the “one-board-per-quarter” cadence forced by legacy EDA workflows. So we started Diode to close that gap.

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The Broken Workflow

  1. Siloed design in heavyweight, decades-old EDA suites.
  2. Manual export of a dozen file formats, each with hidden assumptions.
  3. Email ping-pong with fabricators over spacing, drill tables, and stack-ups.
  4. Spin, wait, repeat—all while the BOM mutates in the background.
Every time you reroute because a part goes EOL or the board comes back with cryptic “DFM violations,” you lose precious calendar days. Worse, your company loses confidence to iterate.

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Our Solution

Traditionally, Electronic Design Automation (EDA) has faced several limitations. Our goal is to redesign the entire stack to make it better for humans AND machines:
  • Open Source, Pythonic Code: Unlike proprietary, closed schemas, Diode’s open and human-readable code is easily understood by LLMs for generation and readily reviewable by humans.
  • Lightning-Fast Verification: Our Rust core compiles full designs in milliseconds, drastically speeding up the verification process.
  • Designed for manufacturing: We move beyond “one-size-fits-nobody” rulesets by incorporating shop-specific, machine-readable constraints from the outset, ensuring tailor-made and efficient design adherence.
We began on the shoulders of giants: KiCad is the gold standard in open-source electronics, so we’re proud to become a Platinum Sponsor.

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What We Offer Today

  • A board design every 4 days A single EE at diode shipped 100+ unique designs last year without too much effort (it was still hard).
  • Fortune 100 & frontier startups Teams at Physical Intelligence, Saronic, and several Tier-1s are already using Diode to shrink revision counts from five to one.
  • Format-agnostic output If your workflow is Altium or Cadence today, you’ll still get BRDs, ODB++, or IPC-2581 - just without the pain.
Each board pushed through Diode feeds a feedback loop: real-world yield data, stack-up quirks, upstream lead-times, even reflow profiles. The compiler gets smarter; your next design gets safer.

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Where We’re Headed

Our ambition isn’t to be an “AI PCB copilot.” We’re teaching machines to reason about physical constraints—electrical, thermal, mechanical—and to take designs all the way to a box you can hold. When you hire Diode, you’re hiring an automated schematic engineer, layout specialist, and manufacturing liaison all rolled into one. Someday opening Altium for a fresh design should feel as retro as FTP-ing static HTML. Talking to Diode’s model will be faster.

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Why Now

Reshoring, defense urgency, and shrinking component lifecycles mean hardware teams can’t afford six-week spins. That’s why we’re thrilled to partner with Andreessen Horowitz, alongside Y Combinator, to scale Diode’s compiler and onboard more fabs.

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Join Us

We’re hiring world-class electrical engineers and systems hackers who want to ship real boards. If rebuilding the hardware toolchain from transistor up to BOM excites you, let’s talk. → careers@diode.computer Hardware can move at the speed of software. We’re writing the compiler that makes it so.