Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1406534
64 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2021 soware, LumiQuote, digitizes and automates the quoting processes for EMS companies. It reduces the friction at the intersection be- tween OEMs and EMS providers that current- ly exists because of lengthy traditional work- flows, and paves the way to smart data usage and decision-making in the future. As humans, we can learn new skills in a lin- ear fashion when it comes to a broad range of tasks. But technology grows exponentially. Be- cause work is highly divided in our current so- ciety and professional skills are highly special- ized, we experience a specialist shortage in many niche areas these days. But if we want to stay on top of that exponential growth curve and use tech to its fullest potential, we need those very few experts in their respective niche areas to build soware that's usable by the big- ger mass. What we see happening to hardware produc- tion processes now is the same trend that we've been seeing in soware development with the low-code/no-code development. Many expert soware developers are building abstraction layers to enable different groups of people— for example, people who are experts in the business context of an application itself—to do more of the technical work, so they can keep up with a huge demand for new products. I think that is exactly what is going to spill over to the electronics industry as well and it is our vision to build this fundamental data and soware lay- er called the Electronics Operating System. Matties: Tell us how your tools work and who buys them. Schaal: Our current tool is mainly for EMS companies, allowing them to deliver accurate quotations to their customers at unparalleled speed. But we want to go beyond only automat- ing quoting workflows. Our thinking is, "ere is so much knowledge in the EMS industry that sits in data silos, Excel sheets, and heads of ex- perts. How can we condense this into soware to make it widely accessible?" In other words, "How can we slowly build up a resident engi- neer for everyone so that we get the full knowl- edge, not just for the very big projects, but for every single project involved?" Currently, we are mainly selling to high-mix, low-volume EMS companies, primarily in Eu- rope. We started in the DACH, beginning with some smaller companies with a few million dollars in revenue, and are now up to the larg- er EMS companies in Europe. We have our roadmap and know exactly what we have to build, so to prepare for a wider ex- pansion, we are now fully focused on our prod- uct maturity. Besides varying in size and loca- tion, we also sell different "packages." Some of our customers are simply licensing the current state of our product, while others are develop- ment partners in a joint mission we're working toward. ey're already buying into this joint vision now, but the features that they need are not yet there. Matties: So, this is not a circuit design or layout tool, right? You still need the designer to de- sign a circuit board. Schaal: Correct. Luminovo started out as an AI service company, so we were natural- ly attracted to investigate the design automa- tion space. However, if you look at reinforce- ment learning, a style of machine learning, as a promising new approach for this, it always comes down to how good your reward func- tion is. How well can you say what a good As humans, we can learn new skills in a linear fashion when it comes to a broad range of tasks. But technology grows exponentially.