Trace is an AI-native PCB design tool built by WishEDA Inc. We're a small team on a big mission: bring the future of hardware design to every engineer.
To make PCB design radically faster and more accessible. We believe hardware engineers deserve the same AI-powered tooling that software developers have had for years. Trace exists to close that gap.
Designing a PCB today still means weeks of manual work: drawing schematics by hand, hunting for components across distributor sites, routing traces, cross-referencing datasheets, running design rule checks one at a time. But the real bottleneck isn't any single step - it's the constant context switching. We watched hardware engineers work. Every few minutes they'd stop designing, open a new Chrome tab, search for a datasheet, check a reference design in another tab, look up a pin mapping in a third, compare prices on Digi-Key in a fourth, then try to remember where they left off in their schematic. Engineers spend more time juggling context than they do engineering. That's where Trace comes in. We bring all of that context - datasheets, component data, design rules, reference circuits - directly into the design environment so you never have to leave. AI agents handle the lookup, the cross-referencing, and the tedious manual steps. You stay in flow and focus on the design decisions that actually matter.
Experienced engineers already know how to design - they want to move faster. They want AI-powered review, supply chain awareness, and less time on repetitive work they've done a thousand times. Newcomers have a different problem entirely: the learning curve is brutal, the tools are hostile, and the tribal knowledge that separates a working board from a broken one isn't written down anywhere. Trace is for both - so veterans stay in flow, and newcomers can actually get started. We'll be honest: the early versions aren't yet at the point where a complete beginner can pick it up and design a board from scratch. But the engineers who've used it - people with real experience designing PCBs - have seen serious acceleration to their workflow. That's where we're starting, and we're working toward making it accessible to everyone.
We're not bolting AI onto legacy tools. Trace is AI-native from the ground up - purpose-built for a workflow where intelligent agents handle the tedious parts and engineers focus on what matters: the design intent.
PCB design is a combinatorial optimization problem - the same class as the traveling salesman problem, but worse. Even a simple board has more placement combinations than there are atoms in the universe. The real problem space is 10+ dimensions: electromagnetic fields that move in time, behavior that changes with frequency and temperature, materials that are imperfect and nonlinear, fields that couple and interact with each other, manufacturing variance, current densities, thermals. If any of it isn't carefully accounted for, the board either doesn't work or self-destructs. The industry has hit a local maximum. You can't optimize a manual workflow into an automated one. You need a fundamentally different approach.
Recent advances in frontier models - deeper reasoning, longer context, better spatial understanding - have shown that this kind of cross-domain reasoning across electronics, geometry, physics, and manufacturing constraints is becoming tractable in software for the first time. The AI handles the reasoning layer. The physics still runs through real solvers and DRC engines. The breakthrough is combining the two.
Trace is built on top of KiCad, the leading open-source EDA suite. We contribute back to the community and believe great tools should be accessible to everyone - from students to startups to production teams.