Why AllSpice Actions: Hardware DevOps in electronics design

Overview

Over the last 15 years, I’ve watched automation tools completely change how software teams develop and release products. The advent and adoption of continuous test and deployment tools, like Jenkins, Circle CI, and GitHub Actions have allowed software teams to quickly and confidently react to changing demands and wrangle increasingly complex system designs by enabling automated test infrastructure, deployment, and release.

Two years ago, the “chip supply shortage” left the entire hardware design and production world in shambles. Whole production lines were going offline due to component unavailability, and consumers watched from the sidelines as prices of goods went through the roof. The increase was due to decreased supply, kickstarting inflation that we are still dealing with today.

Electronics design teams were left smack in the middle of this calamity, struggling with legacy release processes that were never designed to react as quickly as needed to update, qualify, and release new component changes. My co-founder, Valentina Ratner, and I saw this vulnerability in the hardware design process years before. Though we never could’ve predicted how the chip supply shortage & COVID-19 would look, we had seen the ever-increasing pressures on hardware teams and knew the current tooling was woefully insufficient. It was only a matter of time before EE teams would be left picking up the check.

At that time, AllSpice was the first EDA company to build remote, asynchronous design review and release tooling for electrical engineer teams, supporting native Altium, KiCad, Cadence OrCad, System Capture, and Allegro. Since then, we’ve watched teams that had previously struggled with those legacy release processes, PDF exports, and in-person design reviews completely rebuild their workflows & qualify new releases at an order-of-magnitude increased rate.

Empowering engineers through automation

Now, with AllSpice Actions, we have capabilities software teams have seen the benefit of for the last decade as the first EDA tool to launch an automated, highly customizable test & release workflows for ECAD files. Here are just a few of the exciting ways we’ve watched hardware teams build automated workflows to enable 10x design teams:

Building nightly checks for parts stock and availability (just like GitHub dependabot in software!)
Automatically building BOM documents & getting updated assembly costs from self-managed databases
Validating design assets, like pin-tables and printed circuit board (PCB) specifications
Adding approved part list (APL) qualification for all components and checks to validate component specs (like temperature, RHOS, or automotive qualification)
Connecting AllSpice.io & EE workflows to other project management tools, like Jira