Trace now submits orders directly to PCBWay via their Partner API. AI autofills every order parameter from your design, PCBWay-specific DRC presets catch fab violations at design time, live quotes and freight calculation happen inside the editor, and three payment paths are available. Fabrication progress is tracked stage-by-stage without leaving Trace.
We're partnering with PCBWay to bring one-click manufacturing into Trace. Starting today (in beta), you can submit finished designs directly to PCBWay without leaving the editor. Fabrication, turnkey assembly, live quotes, freight calculation, payment routing, and live fabrication progress all live inside Trace.
PCBWay is one of the largest PCB fabricators in the world. They ship hundreds of thousands of boards a month to engineers in 170+ countries. Up to 14 layers, HDI, blind and buried vias, impedance control, castellated holes, edge plating. Turnkey assembly with BGA support, kitted or combo options. The kind of capacity that can handle a one-off prototype or a production run without a different relationship for each.
Why This Matters
Getting a board manufactured used to mean generating Gerbers, zipping them up, uploading them to a fab's website, re-entering every parameter about your board by hand into their order form, hoping your design rules match their capabilities, waiting for a human at the quote desk to look it over, and eventually getting a price. If anything was wrong (minimum trace width off, drill size below what the fab supports, via annular ring too thin) you were back in your EDA tool fixing things and restarting the entire process.
That loop is now one click. Trace reads your .trace_pcb and autofills every order parameter PCBWay needs: layer count, dimensions, minimum trace/space, drill sizes, surface finish, silkscreen sides, via process, copper weight. PCBWay-specific DRC presets (2-layer 1oz, 2-layer 2oz, 4-layer 1oz, 6+-layer 1oz) load into your project at design time, so fab-process violations get caught before you submit, not after. The AI validates, submits, waits for the quote, pulls freight options based on your shipping address, and hands you everything you need to confirm.
What's Live
- Direct order submission to the PCBWay Partner API from inside Trace. No separate portal, no copy-pasting, no re-uploading files.
- AI-assisted autofill. The AI analyzes your board and recommends every order field, tuned to PCBWay's capability matrix.
- Manufacturer DRC presets. Load PCBWay's real process tolerances into your project. Catch violations at design time.
- Live quotes. Trace requests the quote, gets pricing and lead time back, and shows it in the editor.
- Freight calculation. Seven carrier options (DHL, FedEx, EMS, SF Express, Global Standard, HK Post, and more) priced against your shipping address.
- Payment. Three paths: pay through Trace via Stripe (we handle the PCBWay settlement), use your PCBWay partner credit (AccountPay, settled monthly), or pay PCBWay directly through their hosted payment page.
- Live fabrication progress. Once an order enters production, Trace pulls stage-by-stage progress from PCBWay's API on demand: material prep, inner layer imaging, plating, outer layer, solder mask, silkscreen, surface finish, E-test, QC, shipping.
- Order management. List, view, cancel, resume payment, and re-download submitted files for every order.
The Bigger Picture
We've written before about what a modern SMT line looks like - machines talking to each other end-to-end, from stencil printer to AOI, with no humans in the loop between load and unload (Trace × Pikkolo covers this in detail). That line is only as fast and reliable as its inputs. If the Gerbers are noisy, if the BOM has bad part numbers, if the pick-and-place file has wrong rotations, the whole chain stalls or silently produces scrap.
Trace sits at step 0. We generate the stencil files, the pick-and-place CPL coordinates, the DRC-validated Gerbers, and a BOM with distributor part numbers automatically from the design. When a board comes off Trace, everything downstream already has what it needs.
PCBWay is our first public fab partnership and our biggest one by capacity. We also have a US-based assembly partner, Pikkolo Assembly in Denver, who now also offer their own US-based PCB fabrication (beta). They're building automation on top of classic turnkey: YOLO models for component detection, CLIP embeddings for autonomous feeder setup, and what used to be an hour of manual PnP configuration is now minutes of autonomous scanning. We wrote about them in detail in Trace × Pikkolo.
Looking for a US Fab Partner
We're actively looking for a US-based fabrication partner. If you're running an automated line, building toward a dark-foundry model (no humans in the loop between step 1 and step 6), or standing up bare-board fabrication capacity and want Trace to be the software layer for whatever you build, we have customers who need boards made. Labor eats margins in the US, which is exactly why a software-first, machine-first line has a real shot here.
If that's you, head to the partnerships page or email us directly.
How to Use It
One-click manufacturing is rolling out this week to beta members first. You'll see "Send to Manufacturer" surfaced in the export flow and the AI will suggest PCBWay submission when you finish a design. Available on Pro, Pro Team, Ultra, Ultra Team, and On-Demand plans when it opens to everyone.
Full walkthrough in the docs. If you don't have a Trace account yet, download Trace and try it. Design a board, click ship, get boards.
More partners coming soon.
— Ayomide Adekoya
Co-Founder & CEO, Trace