I was just thinking about the 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, writer, and photographer, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll).
Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass continue to influence us today, not just as beloved children’s stories but as enduring works that challenge the boundaries of logic, language, and imagination.
At their heart, both books are filled with logical conundrums, puzzling paradoxes, and playful reasoning, reflecting Charles’ background in math and logic. He employed nonsensical situations and absurd dialogues to explore profound ideas about meaning, identity, time, and even mathematics, all disguised within fantastical storytelling.
On the off chance you were wondering, Charles adopted the pen name “Lewis Carroll” by Latinizing and anglicizing his given names: Lutwidge (a form of Ludwig) became “Lewis,” while Charles became “Carolus,” which he then anglicized to “Carroll.” The good reverend used this pseudonym to separate his literary works, particularly the whimsical and imaginative ones, from his academic writings. But we digress…
In the context of this column, I was thinking about the conversation between Alice and the White Queen. While explaining the importance of imagination and the flexibility of thinking, which are central themes in Carroll’s work, the Queen tells Alice, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” I think I have more than an inkling as to what she meant, because I, too, am becoming used to seeing and believing things that would have been regarded as being beyond the bounds of possibility just a few short years ago.
The reason for my current cogitations and ruminations is that I was just chatting with
Tobias Pohl, who is the Founder and CEO at CELUS.
Before we proceed, I would like to mention that CELUS is one of the companies I will be discussing in my soon-to-be-celebrated presentation at the upcoming Embedded Online Conference, May 12 to 16, 2025. My session, AI in Embedded Systems and Life Writ Large, will take place at 12:00 EDT on Thursday, May 15. A live question-and-answer session will follow, so I hope you’ll be able to join me to “chew the fat,” as it were. (Shhh, don’t tell anyone, but using promo code MAXFIELD2025 when you REGISTER will result in a $50 discount—see my column, Only the Most Epic Embedded Online Conference Ever, for more details).
As you may recall, I introduced CELUS in a column last year (see From Thought to Circuit in Record Time with AI). One way to think about CELUS is as acting as a bridge between electronics designers at one end of the process and component manufacturers and distributors at the other end.
As Tobias says, it’s ultimately the responsibility of the electronics engineers to take an idea all the way from the initial requirements to becoming a complete, physical product that can be manufactured. A significant part of this is component selection, where finding the right components out of 600 million options and selecting the best solutions requires spending an absurd amount of time reviewing data sheets and cutting corners by reusing past work.
By the time we get to the schematics, any component selection decisions are essentially “baked in.” This is unfortunate, because it’s only when the design is nearing manufacturing that everyone wants to become involved and help the engineer—this is where the manufacturing services, distributors, and component manufacturers make their deals.
Looking at things from the perspective of the distributors and component manufacturers, they are “blind to the long tail,” as it were. That is, they typically only become aware of a project’s existence when it’s entering the manufacturing process and components are being ordered. The decisions about which components to use were made months or years prior to this point, meaning the time for supporting, guiding, and influencing these decisions is now long past. Only around 30% of companies, specifically the top enterprises, receive a high level of support, while 70% of companies, including smaller players, are underserved.
Component manufacturers are blind to the long tail (Source: CELUS)
Although component manufacturers and distributors do offer some level of support by providing information such as application notes, reference designs, and data sheets, this is not what you might call “top-tier” support.
If you are an engineer at Apple, for example, no matter who you call at a component distributor or manufacturer, you’ll find they have an account management team standing by, quivering in anticipation and anxious to respond to your every whim. By comparison, the vast majority of engineers are forced to fend for themselves, which means they have an insane amount of data to wrap their brains around, which is where CELUS leaps onto the center of the stage with a fanfare of flugelhorns (my ears are still ringing).
This is probably a good time to note that CELUS’s technology is free for engineers to use, which may explain why tens of thousands of them are already doing so. The component distributors and manufacturers pay for everything (bless their little cotton socks). This isn’t because they are altruistic (heaven forbid); rather, it’s because CELUS provides them with analytics and insights as to how the engineers are making their decisions and the decisions they are making, all of which translates into driving revenue. In addition to anonymized data, CELUS will provide component distributors and manufacturers with leads to those engineers who opt in by indicating that they want to be contacted, thereby allowing the distributors and manufacturers to join the party earlier in the game (I never metaphor I didn’t like).
Speaking of technology, in addition to being free for engineers, the CELUS Design Platform is 100% cloud-based. This means you can use it on anything from a tablet computer to a laptop to a workstation. This platform leverages modular building blocks called CUBOs, where “CUBO” is short for “CELUS Block.” One way to use CUBOs is via a drag-and-drop interface. For example, you can drag-and-drop CUBOs representing microcontrollers, sensors, and actuators into the design canvas and connect them using simple point-to-point lines. You can augment these blocks with as much or as little detail as you wish, like “8-bit data bus” for a microcontroller, or “I2C interface” for a sensor.
The system also features an AI-powered design assistant, called CUBOt, which leverages the CUBOs to automate the design process. When you click the “Resolve” button, CUBOt selects appropriate CUBOs based on your input or requirements, assembles them into a complete, functional electronic design, ensures compatibility, adherence to constraints, and optimal layout, and generates outputs such as schematics, Bill of Materials (BoM), and PCB layouts. One way to think about this is that CUBOs are like LEGO bricks for electronics design, while CUBOt is like a robotic builder that reads your instructions and assembles the LEGO bricks into a finished product.
But wait, there’s more, because the chaps and chapesses at CELUS have just announced the next generation of AI-driven hardware design as part of their CELUS Design Platform. And when I say “just,” I mean that their announcement preceded this column by a matter of seconds (so you heard it here first).
The new CELUS Design Assistant offers true idea-to-canvas capabilities, enabling the creation of full projects from simple images or text commands. For example, you can type in “Design an xxx,” whatever an ‘xxx’ is, and the AI-enabled “assistant” will create a system architecture to satisfy the project. You can then select top-level components based on your preferred vendors, following which a comprehensive schematic of the design will be created, ensuring compatibility, reducing risk, and minimizing the time from plan to revenue.
Alternatively, you can sketch a block diagram on a whiteboard, napkin, or the back of an envelope, take a photo of it using your smartphone, and then feed this image to the CELUS Design Platform. The CELUS Design Assistant will take things from there.
From napkin to design (Source: CELUS)
Tobias just gave me a live demo of this capability. I was flabbergasted. I think it’s safe to say that my flabber has rarely been so gasted (I’m still massaging it back into shape).
The great thing is that you don’t have to take my word for any of this because you can bounce over to the CELUS website and take it for a spin yourself (there’s even a handy-dandy self-guided tour, which will have you up and running before you know it).
All I can say is that if, say, five or so years ago, you’d told me we would have this sort of capability, I would have found it difficult to believe that we would have it so soon. I think that even the White Queen might have found it challenging to wrap her brain around this one, yet here we are. Now I’m wondering what I’m going to be asked to believe tomorrow. Whatever it is, I bet it will be exciting. What say you? Do you have any thoughts you’d care to share on any of this?
