CircuitHub, an electronics design facilitator, launched today with its universal electronics parts library -- the first step in radically altering the economics and accessibility of low-volume manufacturing.

Backed by Y Combinator, CircuitHub attracted investments from Google Ventures and several angel investors including Paul Buchheit (the inventor of Gmail), Matt Cutts (creator of Google SafeSearch), Alexis Ohanian (cofounder of Reddit), Harj Taggar (cofounder Auctomatic), and Garry Tan (cofounder of Posterous), among others.

CircuitHub offers the world’s first free online parts library that directly integrates with nearly all popular electronics design tools. The CircuitHub library’s goal is to build the world’s most trusted, collaborative, and accurate source for electronic component information.

“Having worked with hundreds of students, I noticed that nearly everyone’s design contained at least one error that would corrupt its manufacturability: mistakes in the materials ordered, drafting mistakes in the library data, or alignment errors when one portion of the part data didn’t match up to another. No one was getting into the factory correctly the first time,” reported Dr. Jonathan Friedman, co-founder.

Managing component library data is a broadly suffered problem even among professional engineers. In a recent survey by Printed Circuit Design & Fabrication, three out of every four engineers listed it as a very important problem, and nearly everyone (more than 93 percent) believed it was an important part of the design process. The Aberdeen Group reported that engineers spend almost half their day on just that part of the job.

The average cost of one of these mistakes exceeds $10,000, not including lost time and productivity, according to an Aberdeen Group study. Such costs are survivable for a large company but pose an existential threat to startups and hobbyists.

“That’s essentially what happens on Kickstarter,” explained Andrew Seddon, CircuitHub’s other founder. “Kickstarter is the largest crowd-funding site where anyone can help fund ideas proposed by anyone else. The single biggest project and the highest funded category are both dominated by electronics. Yet 84 percent of the top physical product-based projects were severely delayed primarily due to problems with interfacing design data into and through factories. This problem is exactly what the CircuitHub library is designed to address.”

“If we’re going to end this nightmare once and for all, we need a free global solution -- a way to draw a part once, provide peer review, validate it, and then use it in every design software package,” Friedman concluded.

CircuitHub’s goal is to raise first-time factory success rates to 100 percent and eliminate the engineering costs associated with creating and maintaining parts libraries. CircuitHub’s parts library is free, currently works with Eagle, Altium Designer, Cadence OrCAD/Allegro (more coming soon), and is available at https://circuithub.com.

About CircuitHub

Founded in 2011, CircuitHub is an electronics design facilitator whose mission is to take the frustration out of designing and manufacturing electronics. CircuitHub manages CAD/EDA data, supply chain, and sourcing by providing a deep look and broad coverage of the component market. CircuitHub is funded by Y Combinator, Google Ventures, and several angel investors and is headquartered in San Jose, CA. For more information on CircuitHub please visit https://circuithub.com.