Diode
- Source
- youtube.com
- Author
- The Generalist
- Date
Context
Diode, a Brooklyn startup led by co-founder and CEO Davide Asnaghi, applies AI to printed circuit boards, the boards that connect a device's chips and components. According to the episode description, the company began as a design-validation tool and pivoted during Y Combinator into a full-stack business that designs and manufactures boards in the United States.
The central claim comes from Diode itself: the episode discusses how the company's models can produce much of a schematic design in one attempt and shorten hardware timelines from months to weeks. Diode has also partnered with Anthropic to make Claude a better electrical engineer. The description presents these as topics and ambitions, so the speed claim remains the company's account rather than a measured result.
- Davide Asnaghi, formerly of Apple's Special Projects Group, co-founded Brooklyn-based Diode to use AI to design and manufacture circuit boards in the United States; two years in, its customers include Physical Intelligence and Saronic.
- Diode partners with Anthropic to make Claude a better electrical engineer, and its models can one-shot much of schematic design, compressing hardware timelines from months to weeks.
- A three-week pivot during Y Combinator transformed Diode from a design-validation tool into a full-stack circuit-board manufacturer.
- Asnaghi calls circuit boards the "forgotten middle child" between silicon and software — the West outsourced PCB manufacturing to Asia in the 2000s, and he argues bringing it back matters for American competitiveness.
- Asnaghi's conviction came from time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen studying Asia's electronics manufacturing ecosystem, which he believes has a manufacturing culture Silicon Valley can learn from; Diode's stated ambition is to make hardware as nimble as software.
“Why Davide calls himself a copper merchant”
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