Thursday, January 24, 2013

CircuitHub, With Roots At UCLA, Launches Hub For Hardware Designers

A new startup looking to revolutionize the sharing of information on electronic parts for hardware designers, CircuitHub, launched today, looking to bring an open source, collaborative community to the sharing of electronic part libraries. The firm--co-founded and headed by UCLA Visiting Scholar Jon Friedman--has created an online site which lets hardware designers tap into the data sheets, symbols, components, and footprints of electronic components, for free, either by downloading or by connecting a Dropbox account. Friedmam is a PhD from UCLA in Electric Engineering, and who has been a postdoc at both USC and its Information Sciences Institute. As part of its launch, the firm said it has raised a round of funding from a long list of Silicon Valley investors, including Google Ventures, Y Combinator, and angels Paul Buchheit, Matt Cutts, Garry Tan, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar, and others. CircuitHub's component library runs with a variety of popular electronics layout and CAD software programs.