Hardware Engineers, Manufacturing Leaders Ready to ‘Build Better’ Electronics

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

According to Instrumental’s dynamic CEO, Anna-Katrina Shedletsky, the Build Better Electronics Manufacturing Summit on Sept. 30 was a passion project meant to provide a forum for hardware engineering senior leadership, who have very busy jobs and limited opportunities, to share information, thought leadership, and networking opportunities.

“Build Better is really about cross-pollination and sharing,” she said, as she highlighted the importance of supporting this type of sharing in tech, which may be more important than ever before.

The Build Better summit returned to the USS Hornet, a World War II retired aircraft now functioning as the Sea, Air and Space Museum in Alameda, California. The ship, now something of a Bay Area icon, is in the center of an area dedicated to honoring U.S. history, from WWI to the U.S. moon landing era. It felt like an ideal place to talk about the extraordinary achievements in tech and the challenges in manufacturing and powering them, both now and in the future.

Build Better’s audience is leadership-focused, with largely CEO and COO-level leadership, senior engineers, product development, and manufacturing managers in attendance. This was Instrumental’s fourth Build Better summit, and attendance appeared consistent with last year’s event. The presentations and discussions around problems and solutions were candid and often focused on what attendees can do in their own companies and teams.

Instrumental is a manufacturing AI and data platform designed to address what it identifies as an $8 trillion inefficiency in global production, with a clear, stated goal to reduce manufacturing waste by half.

Founded in 2014 by Shedletsky and Samuel Weiss, two former Apple engineers, the startup unifies serialized test data, images, and video across previously siloed data sites and formats them into a traceable digital thread across product lifecycles. The platform utilizes AI to discover novel defects, intercept known issues in real-time, and significantly accelerate the failure analysis process. The result is a 90% reduction in engineering time and “time to truth”— the primary metric for production efficiency.

Many Instrumental hardware customers, developers, and manufacturers gave presentations during the six sessions sprinkled throughout the day, which were nicely broken out by multiple networking sessions designed to maximize the event's benefits for attendees. 

Not surprisingly, AI was the theme of the day, heralded as the driver for electronics hardware product development in three key markets: consumer, high power computing, and data center infrastructure, which Shedletsky said is “the most complex electronics being built at scale today.” Defense and aerospace was also a big topic.

She believes the latter two segments have much to offer the commercial sector regarding their close collaboration with CM partners and engagement in “coopetition.” The presentations were organized around the primary drivers of NPI: speed and innovation.

Panelists from Backbone, Archer, NVIDI, L3 Harris, Cerebras, Cisco, Logitech, Whoop, OURA, AWS, and Firestorm, a defense start-up, addressed several key questions, including “What’s a realistic time for bringing new product to market?” and “Why can’t we get more data transparency between CMs and customers?” The criticality of team culture and the “urgency/recklessness algorithm” (speed/time to truth) were discussed, as were the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing. For the first time, the final panel featured defense presenters discussing how to rebuild the U.S. Defense Industrial Base. It took a hard look at what the Ukraine war has taught us about manufacturing defense tech.

There were perhaps too many to recount, but here are a few of my favorite words of wisdom shared throughout each session:

• “A few things we can all agree on: Moore’s Law is dead, and even before you start looking at individual workloads, there is a shift from CPU-based computing to GPU-based computing. These two things are really changing the data center.”
• “To get the 20-30x more performance, we must innovate within the chip, outside of the chip, the software stack, all of it.” 
• “It’s not just about building products, it’s about building the factories that build these products, and there is a ton of opportunity there.”
• “These systems are becoming increasingly complex to put together. You have to design for automation. Anything repetitive must be robotic.”
•  “Don’t underestimate the cost factor of manufacturing domestically. You forget about the cost of sending teams to Asia, the cost of losing employees who are forced to travel 30% of the time for their job, and the shipping costs overseas. Even a decade ago, the math was surprisingly favorable to manufacturing domestically if you utilized tax credits and other incentives. Only 1–2% off.”

As I left the aircraft carrier at the end of the summit, reflecting on the experience, I found myself marveling once again about where we find ourselves in electronics product development and manufacturing, and at the pace of change, which seems to increase exponentially.

One comment that is particularly true and will remain lodged in my brain is that it is no longer just the end-products we are grappling with, but the systems and processes that build them that are presenting an equal challenge.

As ever, it’s an exciting time to be in the electronics industry.     

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