The Design Assistant now drafts a plan for the engineer to approve before it does the work, and cites a source for each component it recommends

MUNICH, Oct. 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CELUS today launched an agentic workflow for its Design Assistant. The workflow helps hardware engineers plan the architecture and component work at the start of an electronics design, before schematic capture, and carries out that plan once the engineer approves it. It is available now in beta on the CELUS Design Platform.

Previously, engineers starting a new system would piece together an architecture from datasheets, distributor searches and general-purpose chatbots, which can invent part numbers and leave every answer to be checked by hand against a datasheet. Until now, the Design Assistant also worked one prompt at a time, with the engineer holding the overall plan. With the agentic workflow, the assistant handles the planning and research, and the engineer makes the decisions. Engineers go through fewer revision rounds and run into fewer problems late in a project. The trade-off is that each request takes longer than a single prompt, since the assistant plans and checks its work first. The workflow:

• Captures intent: The engineer describes the product, and the assistant asks about interfaces, power budget, cost and compliance, then records the answers in an Intent Document with a step-by-step plan.
• Waits for approval: Nothing runs until the engineer approves the plan, and the engineer can stop, redirect or edit the work at any step.
• Builds the architecture: The assistant produces a block diagram of the system and researches components, citing the datasheet or specification behind each recommendation.
• Reviews its own output: It proposes fixes for errors the project reports and compares the design against the requirements in the Intent Document, flagging any it does not meet.
• Finds alternatives: When a part is expensive or has a long lead time, it ranks substitutes by price, lead time or preferred suppliers.
• Works with existing tools: Block diagrams, reference schematics and bills of materials export to Altium Designer, KiCad, Siemens EDA (Xpedition) or Autodesk Fusion.

“Engineering teams are being asked to ship more product variants on shorter schedules with fewer senior engineers, and component choices now get locked in at the very start of a project,” said Tobias Pohl, founder and CEO of CELUS. “That first stage is where we built the Design Assistant. It proposes a plan, an engineer approves it before anything goes into the design, and every recommendation links to the datasheet behind it. The decision stays with the person who has to stand behind the design.”

AI agents are already a standard part of software engineering, and the CELUS workflow applies them to planning physical products. More than 60,000 engineers in more than 100 countries use the CELUS platform, which draws on a library of more than 560,000 components. The Design Assistant has been in production since May 2025, and CELUS partners include NXP® Semiconductors, Würth Elektronik and Siemens EDA. NXP offers CELUS technology to its own customers through the NXP Block Diagram Designer, Powered by CELUS.

“Every electronic product begins with an idea and the engineering decisions that turn it into reality. We want engineers designing with NXP to have an assistant grounded in the same knowledge our application engineers rely on. That’s why we built the NXP Block Diagram Designer, Powered by CELUS. Engineers can describe an idea in plain language and develop it into a design using NXP components, with clear reasoning behind each recommendation. We believe this approach will become the starting point for a growing share of the world’s electronic designs,” said Luca Difalco, Senior Vice President, Global Sales at NXP.

Engineers can try the agentic workflow at app.celus.io now.

About CELUS

CELUS is an AI-powered design platform that translates engineering intent into electrically correct circuit implementations. By structuring early design exploration and connecting it to application-ready design blocks, CELUS helps engineers move faster and helps component manufacturers present solutions in real system context. CELUS is headquartered in Munich, Germany, with offices in Porto and Austin. Learn more at www.celus.io.

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SOURCE BAM Agency / CELUS