Changing PCBs as easily as changing software

The company has raised $12 million in a seed round backed by  Upfront Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Colle Capital.

“Software developers have been able to write code, test, and iterate in real time for decades. Itera makes real-time design and iteration possible for hardware too,” said AJ Cooper, CEO and Co-founder of Itera. “Hardware has always been hard because it is permanent. Changing it requires time and money. Itera is making hardware easy. For the first time ever, an engineer can change a circuit and test it again before their coffee gets cold.”

Itera uses electrowetting to control liquid metal alloys on a glass substrate. Electric fields move the liquid metal to form and reconfigure circuit traces in under a minute, letting engineers physically rewire a real board with actual components instead of waiting for new PCBs. 

It’s basically a reprogrammable multilayer substrate combining glass and liquid metal for fast prototyping.

Itera operates through an Electronics-as-a-Service model: customers’ designs are assembled using their actual components on Itera’s multilayer substrates at secure, U.S.-based testing centers.

Customers change and test their hardware and software from anywhere until they have a validated design ready to go to manufacturing.

Unlike simulation software, which cannot replicate real-world component behavior, Itera’s fluid circuit board is actual components with real electrical behaviour.

Engineers can probe any internal circuit node, not just exposed test points.

More at: itera.co