EDA Cafe Industry Predictions 2025 – AllSpice.io

By Valentina Ratner – Co-Founder & CEO, and Kyle Dumont – Co-Founder & CTO, AllSpice.io

Valentina Ratner

Kyle Dumont

Market Trends: “How do you predict consumer behavior and market trends will evolve in 2025, and what strategies are you implementing to meet these changing demands?”

To close out 2024, we surveyed over 1,000 PCB Designers, Hardware & Electrical Engineers. The results were quite consistent with what we hear from our customers and engineers daily. Overall, the ‘doing more with less’ trend will rapidly grow. In 2025, time constraints will pressure Hardware & Electrical Engineers to work more efficiently with teams that have traditionally been siloed from them (i.e. firmware, software.) There will also be an increased demand to automate tasks that take away from design engineers who need to spend time instead designing electronics.

As mentioned in the findings, one of the most significant opportunities we see within the hardware industry for 2025 is addressing the need for alignment across different teams. Many Firmware and Software teams already love git for collaboration, and there’s a strong interest in Hardware joining. There’s always been a desire to build a shared infrastructure and collaborate, but market demands will drive that even further this year.

It’s hard to believe how much the requirements in developing hardware have increased – they’re a lot more complex, there are more components, but the speed to do so has remained stagnant. How are engineers supposed to create more complex products in half the amount of time with the same tools that they have always been using? It just doesn’t match these expectations. Revolutionary products being created at twice the speed within the same system that they installed in 1987… we need better tools in 2025.

I like to think of it as making a simple meal with a stick over the fire. It worked initially, but when you increase the complexity of the ingredients, the preciseness of the temperature, and the measurement of the cooking time, we can no longer use the stick or the bonfire in order to eat.

More and more engineers are doing different types part-time. Many Electrical Engineers are also doing firmware design on the side. Git is an ecosystem people are used to, understand, and like. We created AllSpice.io to enable these engineers to do software and firmware but hardware as well. There isn’t an ‘AllSpice’ way of doing things. We build the bridge for Git to be helpful for different types of engineers.

Having the opportunity to gain a shared vocabulary and break down siloes makes the design process more accessible. Firmware, Hardware, Mechanical, and Software engineers are also more interconnected. Each discipline is more complex, making integration exponentially more complex, which poses a challenge without the proper baseline tools. In a way, it’s like opening this black box for Hardware Engineers, letting them see how these teams all impact the product and how other people can now collaborate with them.

AllSpice.io enables these types of workflows for Hardware and Electrical Engineers. The workflows allow our users to be more collaborative, gain visibility, and decrease overall waste in terms of components. It impacts hardware projects financially in terms of inefficient BOMs and timing in terms of minimizing the errors that must be debugged. This reduces the number of times something has to be prototyped and tested between the actual design, review, and when the product is ready to go to market.

Automation of administrative and non-design related tasks will also be critical for hardware teams to stay ahead of the curve in 2025. We’ve rolled out automations in AllSpice that have enabled engineers to build their own bespoke ones for their enterprises, as well as what we consider to be ‘off the shelf’ automations. Some examples of them are:

• Generating Bill of Materials (BOM) artifacts
• Automating static checks and reviews
• Checking part availability
• Calculating Cost of Goods Sold (C.O.G.S.)
• Verifying parts in APL (Approved Parts List)

To put what we do at AllSpice in simpler terms, we continuously build an operating system or ecosystem to build hardware products. We map out some of the problems we encounter with our potential customers, asking them, ‘what’s wrong with hardware development?’ I will oftentimes bring in other members of our team when conducting these types of customer conversations. One of the compliments we often get from customers is their ability actually to shape what features AllSpice encompasses.

We’re very excited about the amazing things we will launch in 2025 that will continue to modernize what hardware development looks like.

About Valentina Ratner:

Valentina Ratner is a Mechanical Engineer, Co-Founder & CEO of AllSpice.io, a collaboration platform for teams developing hardware. Prior to launching AllSpice out of graduate school, she worked at Amazon as a PM, managing infrastructure projects and internal productivity tools.

Valentina holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University, an M.S. in Engineering (Computer Science), and an MBA from Harvard.

Artificial Intelligence Integration: “How do you envision the role and impact of artificial intelligence in your industry in 2025, and what steps is your company taking to integrate AI into its operations or offerings?”

I think about how much data engineers have that is being underutilized. As an Electrical Engineer, you’re parsing component datasheets & test data, as well as all of your schematic, circuit, and PCB data. We could use all of that information to basically make us better designers. How many mistakes have we made in the past? Over-voltage under-voltage – things like that. This data needs to be better leveraged to inform future design decisions in the hardware development process.

We can catch and prevent issues by teaching a generative AI model to help us avoid making the same mistakes twice. There’s a lot that we can learn and are underutilizing. I can’t wait to see the start of that impact and bring it into the platform we’ve built at AllSpice.io. This is another incredibly powerful way that we’ll continue to enable our engineering customers to make better use of their own data in their electronics development.

This will also be crucial in task automation. As engineers, we seek ways to capture everything in real-time; each issue can be worked on in smaller pieces. Instead of spending 2 weeks every 2 months on paperwork alone, they want a process where they spend an average of 2 extra minutes each day to get back those two weeks on the actual design portion.

Many engineers prefer this over resolving a large number of tickets that have built up over the previous several months. This also allows for continuous testing and feedback instead of a hastened design review at the end.

In one of my recent discussions with an engineering team, one of the lead designers mused that any time they catch an issue in a design, they can add it to their test suite for the benefit of junior engineers. That’s the exact mentality hardware teams should consider – you recognize that you are not only building tests for yourself but for everyone around you. By including these automations in templates, you can include them in new projects by default so that the investment doesn’t only benefit you throughout a current design but through multiple designs, as it snowballs to a shield against all of those pesky, repeatable errors that can sneak in.

About Kyle Dumont:

Kyle Dumont is an Electrical Engineer, the Co-Founder and CTO of AllSpice.io. He has a background in electrical engineering product design, having taken products from concept to mass-manufacturing at iRobot and Voxel8. He specialized in hardware system integration and sensor design, holding 5 patents in these areas. Kyle received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, as well as an MS in Engineering with a focus on Computer Engineering and Machine Learning and an MBA from Harvard.

Category: Predictions

This entry was posted on Monday, January 20th, 2025 at 12:14 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.