PCB Chat 159: AJ Cooper and Itera Aim to Retire the Respin

Andy Shaughnessy (0:11)

Hi, I'm Andy Shaughnessy, Content Architect for PCEA. Here with me today is AJ Cooper, the CEO and co-founder of Itera, and he's also the keynote speaker for the upcoming PCB West.

How are you doing, AJ?

AJ Cooper (0:27)

Great, thanks for having me, Andy. How are you?

Andy Shaughnessy (0:29)

Great, thanks for doing this with us. This liquid metal is very, very exciting stuff.

So just give us a little bit about your background, and that leads into how you all founded Itera.

AJ Cooper (0:42)

Yeah, you bet. Thanks for that. I started out as a builder. I was wrenching on classic British and American hot rods, and went to vocational school and I can rebuild a small block. Then in undergrad, I decided I didn't know enough about electrical. So I went into electrical engineering and going to grad school, I didn't know enough about semiconductors and organics, and ended up getting my master's and PhD in EE, really focused on material science, device physics, and solving those problems at the angstrom level. I then went into industry doing back end of line processing, that's been running in some global fabs, and supporting the infrared night vision. Then I got a chance to be on the production lines, scaling teams and technologies globally. So I've got almost 30 trips in coach to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong. I've been there when a supplier decommits, and says, you can't buy this part.

And I've been in the hotel room with a razor blade and a multimeter trying to figure out and debug what went wrong in a PCB.

I've been scaling those teams at Uber and Lyft for bike share communities. If you've ridden a city bike, or a Bay Wheels, or a Capital Bike Share, I've probably ridden a product teams have worked on. And now, I am trying to build something that we think will be the way that electrical and firmware engineering is done.

SPEAKER_1 (2:13)

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Brought to you by PCEA, Engineering Tomorrow's Electronics.

Andy Shaughnessy (3:12)

I read that you were saying that the problem was always with the hardware.

Tell us how this led you to get into the wood metal. Was there an aha moment?

AJ Cooper (3:22)

That's a good question. It was when I was at Lyft running this hardware team, and I was seeing in many cases that engineers would know what they wanted to do. Let's say we were getting close to production and a vendor released a new chip, or we found an errata in the data sheet, or it performed differently than we expected and it messed up our battery life, and we'd say, oh, we know what we need to do, but frequently we wouldn't go back and do it for fear of going and upsetting something else. Making mistake in security or compliance or certification, and the challenge that I set out to solve was, how do you accelerate that cycle? How do you bend the curve of the scientific method so that you can learn faster? You can test your hypothesis. You can drop that cost to try something to low enough that you can actually try over and over and over again. So I just started picking up the phone and calling people. I thought, what I'd love to be able to do is program the actual copper itself. As far as I can tell, programmable copper is impossible because copper is a pretty amazing metal. But I started out with an idea for, it was similar to a sea of gates. This is really bridging the silicon side of my background.

I talked to chief scientists all over the place and in foundries, and ultimately a VLSI expert said, here's why that won't work.

Undeterred, I just kept calling until I found an expert in liquid metals who said, if you could solve these things, there's no reason it can't be done, but nobody's ever tried. Those things were the overlap with the suffering of my PhD, my time on the production line scaling those teams and technologies. I said, okay, the ball's in my court, I'll take this one.