FlashPCB Awarded Competitive Grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation

R&D funding accelerates the translation of results to impact

Press

Oct 28, 2022

Philadelphia, PA

FlashPCB has been awarded a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for $256,000 to conduct research and development (R&D) work on improvements to the current printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) prototyping process through an AI-powered component selection algorithm. The PCBA prototyping market has barriers, including long lead times and high costs which can limit the number of iterations of a design. Our service addresses each barrier, creating a domestic, economical prototyping service that delivers high quality boards and enables faster and more frequent iteration on designs. This will increase economic competitiveness and foster innovation in the United States.

“FlashPCB’s service has the opportunity to revolutionize the way engineers approach prototyping and designing PCBs. We aim to make releasing boards for manufacturing as easy as saving your CAD files. The NSF’s SBIR program allows us to take deep risks in our research and development process,” says CEO Thomas Castner, “these risks allow us to take a novel approach to manufacturing in an industry that is critical to high tech, national security and healthcare sectors of our economy.”

All proposals submitted to the NSF SBIR/STTR program, also known as America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF, undergo a rigorous merit-based review process. Once a small business is awarded a Phase I grant, it becomes eligible to apply for Phase II funding and additional supplements totaling up to $1.7 million. To get started, startups or entrepreneurs submit a written Project Pitch to see if their technology idea could be a good fit for the program. To learn more about America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF, visit: https://seedfund.nsf.gov/.

NSF has several programs that help accelerate the translation of research results to practice and provide pathways for researchers, startups and aspiring entrepreneurs to move their ideas from the laboratory to the market and society. To learn more about how NSF helps unlock future technologies for national and societal impact, visit: https://beta.nsf.gov/tip/latest.

About the U.S. National Science Foundation's Small Business Programs: America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards more than $200 million annually to startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost all areas of science and technology can receive up to $2 million to support research and development, helping de-risk technology for commercial success. America’s Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $8.8 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.