We're partnering with Pikkolo Assembly, a US-based PCB assembly house in Denver, as our first manufacturing partner. Starting now (in beta), Trace users can ship finished designs straight from the editor into a real production line — populated, inspected, and boxed in America.
Pikkolo isn't a fab. They don't make bare boards. What they do is assembly — taking a bare PCB and populating it with real components. Your choice of where the bare board comes from (Trace can hand it off to a fab partner on your behalf, Pikkolo can source it for you from a US fab they work with, or you can ship your own). Pikkolo handles everything from the moment that bare board lands at their facility: BOM sourcing from DigiKey, Mouser, and Arrow; kitting; SMT assembly; AOI; final inspection; boxing.
We picked Pikkolo as our first partner on purpose. They're small, fast, US-based, and — the part that matters most to us — they're building software on top of hardware instead of around it.
Why Pikkolo
A normal turnkey assembly flow looks like this: you upload Gerbers, a BOM, and a pick-and-place file. A human on the other end spends an hour clicking through your design, aligning the board in CAM software, loading reels into the pick-and-place machine one at a time, matching component rotations against what the PnP expects, and babysitting the first few boards off the line. If anything is wrong — a rotation off by 90°, a footprint that doesn't match the part, a BOM line that's been discontinued — the line stops and someone emails you.
Pikkolo has been systematically automating that hour.
They trained a YOLO model that auto-aligns boards and detects component rotations directly from Gerbers. No more aligning by hand. They automated their feeder setup on their LumenPnPusing CLIP embeddings and frontier scanning — the machine literally looks at your reels and figures out what's on each one. What used to be an hour of clicking to set up 50 feeders is now a few minutes of autonomous scanning. That's the kind of software-on-hardware compounding that actually moves unit economics in US assembly, where labor eats margins.
We want the whole manufacturing stack to compound like that. Pikkolo is the proof point we're starting from.
What's Live
- Direct submission from Trace. No portal, no separate uploads, no re-entering parameters. The AI autofills the order from your
.trace_pcb. - BOM sourcing. Pikkolo sources parts from DigiKey, Mouser, and Arrow using the distributor IDs Trace already attaches to your components. No manual MPN matching.
- Three PCB sourcing modes. (1) Ship your own bare boards to Pikkolo. (2) Have Pikkolo source bare boards from a US fab they work with. (3) Have Trace ship Gerbers to one of our fab partners and route the bare boards to Pikkolo automatically.
- DRC presets. Pikkolo's real process constraints load into your project at design time. Catch process violations before you submit.
- Live order tracking. See kitting, assembly, AOI, and shipping stages from inside Trace.
- US-based. Denver, Colorado. No international shipping, no customs, no tariff surprises. ITAR-friendly for the designs that need it.
Trace is Step 0 of the Automated Line
A modern SMT line is a chain of machines that talk to each other. A bare board goes in one end: the stencil printer lays paste, SPI scans it in 3D to catch bad prints, pick and place grabs components off reels with multiple heads and vision that self-corrects misalignment, the reflow oven locks everything in at ~217°C on a SAC305 profile, AOI scans every joint catching bridges and tombstoning and missing parts at near 99.9% accuracy. The board comes out the other end. No humans in the loop between load and unload. If AOI flags a defect spike, it pings the reflow oven to re-check its thermal profile.
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 real distributor part numbers automatically from the design. When a board comes off Trace, everything downstream already has what it needs to run.
Pikkolo is what happens when the rest of the chain is as software-native as Trace is. That's the bet.
Looking for a US Fab Partner
Pikkolo handles assembly. We're still looking for the right bare-board fabrication partner on the US side — ideally one building toward a dark-foundry model: an automated SMT and fab line with no humans between load and unload. Labor eats margins in the US, which is exactly why a software-first, machine-first line has a real shot here.
If you're running an automated line, standing up bare-board capacity, or building toward this, we have customers who need boards made. Trace will be the software brain of whatever line you stand up.
Head to the partnerships page or email us directly.
How to Use It
Trace × Pikkolo is rolling out this week to beta membersfirst. You'll see "Send to Manufacturer" surfaced in the export flow, and the AI will offer Pikkolo as a destination when you finish a design that needs assembly. Available on Pro, Pro Team, Ultra, Ultra Team, and On-Demand plans when it opens to everyone.
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.