In the past few years, semiconductors have become a hot topic globally, especially within the domestic market.

Under the influence of geopolitics and various factors, domestic suppliers have been making various attempts and breakthroughs in the semiconductor supply chain, striving to break the current situation of near-monopoly. Among them, EDA, as an important tool for designing chips, has also become the top priority for domestic efforts.

For the general public, the EDA that is familiar to everyone may be chip-level EDA, but in fact, another area that is less mentioned - board-level EDA, is also a missing link in the domestic market. As a core component of electronic devices, PCBs are needed to achieve the connection and control between various modules in fields such as communication, automotive, aviation, medical, and robotics, to ensure the stable and reliable operation of electronic products. The board-level EDA for designing PCBs also plays a significant role.

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However, with the many years of investment by manufacturers such as JLCPCB, a crack has been pried open in the encirclement of this field.

Giant companies dominate the market, and Chinese companies are absent.

According to ESD statistics, the global EDA market size was about 13.2 billion US dollars in 2021, a year-on-year increase of about 15.11%, and it is expected that the global EDA market size will reach about 18.334 billion US dollars in 2026. The EDA market can be divided into five major sectors: CAE, Physical Design & Verification, PCB & MCM, SIP, and Services.

Among them, JLCPCB EDA belongs to the board-level PCB & MCM sector, which accounts for about 9% of the global EDA market. The market size of the PCB & MCM sector has grown from 790 million US dollars in 2017 to 1.206 billion US dollars in 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of 11.16%. At present, this field is mainly dominated by the three major overseas manufacturers Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens, with a combined global market share of over 60%.

Board-level EDA software (PCB design software), as a type of electronic design automation (EDA) software, plays an important role in electronic circuit design, including circuit board layout, wiring, verification, production, and other work, all of which rely on this type of software program. It is one of the indispensable helpers for engineers to create circuit diagrams and is also a key part of the new generation of board-level EDA layout.

With the increasing complexity of consumer electronic products, new demands have been put forward for PCB design, and the corresponding board-level EDA has gradually matured from its infancy. In 1999, the Liatro Electrical Design system took the first step in PCB design tools; in 2004, Xiamen Chaolun Software Co., Ltd. launched EDA2002, and added a PCB editor in the subsequent iteration of EDA2008; in 2008, Shanghai Qingyue Software Co., Ltd. released the Qingyue Feng EDA software, which is divided into a standalone version and a network version, and has four commonly used modules: SchLib, SchDoc, PCBLib, and PCBDoc...And these explorations all ended in failure, the reason behind it is the high complexity of EDA, which gives manufacturers in different directions the opportunity for differentiated competition. However, in the more refined field of board-level EDA, not only are the investment requirements high, but the return on investment is also relatively low. This has led to only a few domestic companies in China focusing on the development of board-level EDA software, and this market is still dominated by foreign software.

JLCPCB's EDA, founded in 2010, was also one of the many domestic software that was brave enough to explore at the beginning, but it was able to overcome various difficulties and stand out in the field of board-level EDA after many years of accumulation. In 2017, it launched the standard version, and in 2020, it launched the professional version. With its simple and easy-to-use, fast response and other characteristics, it has become the choice of students, teachers, electronic enthusiasts, and medium and large enterprises.

Nowadays, JLCPCB's EDA, which is continuously developing and innovating, has become one of the few domestic board-level EDA software with independent intellectual property rights. It is also the common choice of more than 3 million users at home and abroad, and its continuous development and innovation have added a new color to the fiercely competitive global EDA industry.

From being not optimistic to shocking the board-level EDA market

"When we first intended to develop a purely domestic board-level EDA software, almost no one was optimistic," said the person in charge of JLCPCB's EDA. "But we still persisted, not for anything else, but to let more domestic engineers use more convenient and more suitable board-level EDA software."

According to the person in charge, JLCPCB's EDA is currently divided into two versions: "Standard Edition" and "Professional Edition". The standard edition is for electronic enthusiasts and educators, used for circuit design with less than 300 components. The professional edition is mainly aimed at professional developers and is tailored for more complex circuit designs.

The standard edition, which was launched in 2017, focuses on simplicity and ease of use, and is easy to get started with. It supports the import and export of Altium Design format files, 3D preview, team collaboration, and has more than 30W JLCPCB's library files and 100W user-contributed library files, which have been highly praised by a large number of electronic enthusiasts and teachers and students of colleges and universities.

The professional edition, released in 2020, has rewritten the entire PCB editor, supporting hierarchical diagrams, multiple-page schematics, 3D STEP file export, 3D preview, subsystem schematic design, multi-board design, enhanced PDF export, import of Protel, Altium Designer, KiCad, EAGLE and a series of important functions, meeting the urgent needs of professional users.

In addition, both versions of JLCPCB's EDA have broken the traditional offline design concept and are based on the cloud platform. The hard-built design will no longer be bound by storage. Users only need to open the browser to modify and view their own circuit design anytime, anywhere. This advantage is incomparable to traditional board-level EDA software.After more than a decade of innovation, JLCPCB EDA has become the leader of the new generation of board-level EDA. Not only has the software functionality become increasingly sophisticated, but the market achievements are also evident:

According to the latest data, JLCPCB EDA has now integrated more than a million free package libraries, tens of thousands of 3D model libraries, and a large number of open-source projects. The global cumulative number of registered users has exceeded 3 million, and the number of hardware design projects has reached 14 million.

It is worth mentioning that JLCPCB EDA has also attracted more than 2 million electronic engineers from over 100 countries and regions worldwide, and has been welcomed by local engineers in the United States, Germany, France, India, and other places. As one of the representatives of the new generation of industrial software, JLCPCB EDA is in a leading position in the field of board-level EDA in terms of both user scale and R&D investment.

When talking about the above achievements, the person in charge of JLCPCB EDA also said: "For domestic software, it is not easy to achieve the above results. After all, the scale of the board-level EDA market is not large, and the return on investment is not high enough. In the early days, JLCPCB EDA not only faced various technical dilemmas, but most users also had doubts about such a new software."

Fortunately, JLCPCB EDA has persisted in the harsh environment to this day. When we look back at this market, we will find that it has already emerged from the heavy siege and achieved a new atmosphere.

From 2009 to 2023, in just over a decade, JLCPCB EDA has gone from being not optimistic to being on par with international giants, and has won millions of users. These achievements are not only admirable but also raise a question: why can it overcome difficulties and stand out in the end?

What is the key to JLCPCB EDA's success on the international stage?

To answer the above questions, we need to have a deeper understanding of the field of board-level EDA. First, it is necessary to clarify that the application scenarios of PCBs cover communication, consumer electronics, computers, automotive electronics, industrial control, medical, aerospace, and other fields. The product types are diverse, the process technologies are different, and the demand for design software also varies greatly.

Among them, different customer groups will have different requirements for software performance: large enterprises require higher professional levels of board-level EDA software function design, while small and medium-sized enterprises, engineers, and teachers and students of colleges and universities require more convenient operation experience.

Therefore, different board-level EDA software has its own focus in terms of functional implementation, and the same software will also develop different versions according to the differences in user groups. The diversity of board-level EDA software leads to a large difference in the format of PCB design files by engineers, which brings certain difficulties to the production and manufacturing of prototype and small batch PCB manufacturers.And more critically, the biggest challenge for self-developed EDA is how to bypass the ecosystem barriers that giants have already built. Most domestic electronic engineers are already familiar with the operation of foreign software, and the PCB board design of enterprises is also centered around foreign software, file formats, usage habits, thinking inertia... All kinds of problems lie in front of Jialichuang EDA.

Faced with the reality of the gap between domestic and foreign, the person in charge of Jialichuang EDA is very candid. When he first started and developed, he did not think that self-developed would be much worse than other manufacturers. The software is not as complicated as imagined, and the development difficulty seems not so high. As long as you work hard, it seems that catching up with international manufacturers is just around the corner.

But the reality is obviously not the case. He said that only by truly getting started can you understand the gap between the two. It seems to be only one or two steps away, but in fact, it requires several years of hard work. Fortunately, Jialichuang has always been willing to invest in research and innovation, as the most solid backing for Jialichuang EDA, helping it through the most difficult times.

To make self-developed EDA catch up with the international leading level, there are three essential secrets to success.

The first is the most basic simplicity and ease of use. The person in charge said that the starting point of Jialichuang's development of board-level EDA software is the needs of users, and most users' needs, in the final analysis, are simple and easy to use. He believes that software with high learning costs is naturally a threshold, keeping many beginners out. When he saw that everyone was always hesitant because of this, he made up his mind to make a simple and easy-to-use board-level EDA software.

Even to achieve simplicity and ease of use, it is not easy for an EDA software. According to the introduction of the person in charge of Jialichuang EDA, every function of Jialichuang EDA, when doing the demand review, will definitely raise a question: is the learning cost of this function high? If it is too high, how to reduce the learning cost?

Jialichuang EDA's slogan is "2 hours to get started, 2 days to master." To achieve this, it is necessary to think about what users think, break away from the original old user thinking, and let new users quickly get started. Jialichuang, which has worked hard on this point, has also gained more praise from users: Learning XX software, I have not yet mastered it after a month, learning Jialichuang EDA, from getting started to receiving Jialichuang's PCB board, it was done in a week, which is very suitable for beginners like me...

Secondly, it is cloud innovation. In today's era of vigorous development of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, cloud-based EDA software can truly achieve seamless access and sharing of data. Jialichuang has made multiple special optimizations for the cloud, implementing the concept of the cloud:

To improve efficiency, Jialichuang EDA has added front-end caching technology, making the software start to the extreme; to facilitate version management, Jialichuang EDA has optimized the UI interface, and you can freely switch and view between various versions by simply creating a version tag; to promote team collaboration, Jialichuang EDA has added collaborative interconnection functions, making it easy to add users to the project or directly choose to join a certain team...The person in charge also stated that JLC (Jialichuang) will continue to listen to the voices of different users. For example, in response to some users' concerns about data security and offline practicality, the updated JLC EDA has specifically added an offline function. When users download the client, they can choose between the offline version and the online version of the project. The offline version only saves project data locally, while the online version saves to the server and automatically stores a local version, satisfying users' sense of security.

A loyal user of JLC expressed great joy: "I am a loyal user of cloud products. For products that can be cloud-based, I will prioritize them and trust the professional team of JLC to protect my data. The launch of the offline version has met my last sense of security. In the future, I can design better PCB boards in JLC EDA with more confidence..."

The time it takes for an EDA product to truly become competitive is often measured in decades, requiring continuous refinement in a large number of application scenarios and technological innovation. To help customers better use JLC EDA, JLC has established a professional customer service team to quickly solve user problems and respond to user needs and suggestions. They are always practicing the mission established at the beginning of the establishment of JLC EDA: to help engineers focus on creation and innovation with simple and efficient domestic EDA tools.

In addition to the above two major secrets, the third major secret for JLC EDA to break through in the international market is the one-stop industry chain. The EDA software can form a good synergy with other businesses such as PCB, electronic components, and electronic assembly, helping to optimize customer experience through technical sharing and information synchronization between business segments in this complete electronic industry service ecosystem that covers hardware, software, services, and content.

The more than 1 million components that JLC EDA currently integrates and updates in real-time allow electronic engineers to check the inventory and price of components during the design process and place orders at any time. This makes it convenient for engineers to focus more on the design, and subsequent processes such as proofing and patching can also be quickly completed through the browser.

Engineers using JLC EDA only need to operate in the cloud and click to confirm to complete a series of operations such as EDA design, PCB proofing/small batch, and SMT patching, truly allowing users to "get from design to the final acquisition of PCBA with one click." This convenient experience is one of the pain points of board-level EDA and also an important reason why many engineers ultimately choose JLC.

The three major secrets have allowed JLC EDA to break the shackles that have trapped self-developed board-level EDA software, providing a better and more suitable choice for a large number of electronic engineers.

At this moment, board-level EDA enters the future.

Under the major trends of Industry 4.0, intelligent manufacturing, and industrial Internet, industrial manufacturing scenarios and new technologies such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence are continuously integrated and developed. The latest "14th Five-Year Plan for the Development of Software and Information Technology Services" has clearly listed EDA software as a key breakthrough in industrial software, and the role of EDA software is becoming more prominent.

Starting in 2010 and innovating for more than ten years, JLC EDA relies on advantages such as simplicity and ease of use, cloud-based, permanently free, and one-stop model, standing at the forefront of the board-level EDA market. In the fiercely competitive market, it has provided a nearly perfect self-developed answer and has become a rapidly rising new star in this field.JLCPCB EDA is based on millions of engineers at home and abroad, proving the possibilities of a new generation of industrial software with innovation, and gaining user recognition with down-to-earth progress. We believe that JLCPCB, which wins with quality and touches people's hearts with service, will promote the domestic EDA industry to enter a brand new stage of development in the process of continuous growth and strengthening.