He studied how a bushbaby leaps, built a robot that out-jumps everything else on legs, and then decided drawing circuit boards by hand was the real waste of human talent.
Most engineers spend their careers fighting one tool at a time. Duncan Haldane keeps inventing the next one. Today he runs JITX, a Berkeley-born company building the strangest pitch in hardware: stop drawing circuit boards, and start writing them.
JITX is a programming language and a compiler for electrical engineers. You describe what a circuit board needs to do - the way you'd write a requirements document - and the software fills in the rest: which components to pick, where to place them, how to wire them, and whether the whole thing is actually correct. Haldane has put it bluntly: "Today engineers use very graphical tools to manually design schematics and circuit boards, and that's just not productive enough anymore."
The comparison he reaches for is chip design. In the 1980s, languages like Verilog and VHDL ended the era of drawing chips by hand and replaced it with code. Decades later, the circuit board - the green rectangle inside nearly every electronic object you own - was still being assembled point by point, by people, by hand. JITX is the argument that boards deserve the same upgrade.
Haldane did not set out to build software. He set out to build robots, and the circuit boards kept getting in the way. At UC Berkeley, where he earned a master's and a PhD in mechanical engineering, he was deep in bio-inspired robotics - machines that borrow their tricks from animals. Every robot needed custom electronics, and every board was a slow, manual slog. The frustration became the idea. The seed of JITX traces back to his graduate work around 2013.
Before the software, though, came the menagerie. And the menagerie set records.
A palm-sized robotic cockroach built from specially 3D-printed parts. It sprints. Officially, it is the fastest robot relative to its size - and the fastest 3D-printed robot ever made.
Named for Saltatorial Locomotion on Terrain Obstacles. Modeled on the galago - a small primate that can string five jumps together in four seconds to clear 8.5 meters.
Salto is the one that made people stop and stare. To design it, Haldane's team did something very Haldane: they invented a way to measure the thing they wanted before they built it. "Developing a metric to easily measure vertical agility was key to Salto's design," he explained, "because it allowed us to rank animals by their jumping agility and then identify a species for inspiration." Rank the animals, pick the champion, copy its physics. The bushbaby won.
That research streak earned him a best-paper award at IROS, the IEEE's flagship robotics conference, and along the way, two Guinness World Records. Not bad for a side effect of being annoyed at electronics.
At Berkeley, Haldane started collaborating with Jonathan Bachrach on better design tools for origami robots. Bachrach had a 35-year track record in design tools and had led the Chisel project at Berkeley - hardware design done in code. The third co-founder, Patrick Li, built FIRRTL, the intermediate representation underneath Chisel3. Three people who had already spent years turning hardware into language. They founded JITX in 2017.
The company didn't start by selling software. It started as a design consultancy - taking on real board projects, delivering them roughly three times faster and about 25% cheaper than the competition, with some test fixtures turned around in 24 hours. Doing the work by hand, faster than anyone else, was how they learned exactly which parts of the work should never be done by hand again. Then they turned the tooling inward and made it the product.
By 2022, JITX had a $12 million Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with Y Combinator, Funders Club and Liquid 2 also on the cap table. The company had gone through Y Combinator's Summer 2018 batch. One demonstration of what the tooling can do: a silicon validation board carrying 2,050 pins arranged in a dense 300-micrometer grid - the kind of layout that makes a human engineer reach for more coffee and more weeks.
The newest chapter folds AI into the compiler. Haldane has described pointing an AI at a requirements document for a high-speed PCB - the model read the spec, wrote JITX Python code, and the compiler turned that code into a complete board design, DDR5 memory, 100G ethernet, RF components and all. The promise isn't to replace the senior engineer. It's to hand the senior engineer the boring 90% - pin assignments, design-rule checks, hunting for parts that are actually in stock - so they can spend their judgment where judgment matters.
JITX states its mission plainly: to automate hardware design "for the benefit of science and the welfare of humanity." It is a big sentence for a company that started because one roboticist got tired of wiring up his own creations. But that is the through-line. Whether it's a jumping robot or a circuit board, Haldane's instinct is the same - find the tedious, error-prone work that humans shouldn't be doing, measure it, and build the machine that does it better.
"That's just not productive enough anymore."
"The compiler starts filling in details for you."