Built by people who ship hardware

Most hardware engineering teams treat libraries, BOMs, symbols, footprints, and boards as disconnected data. A bunch of files for libraries, copy-pasted between projects and perennially out-of-sync. BOMs no-one updates back into the libraries (and why would you? You'd have to fire up Altium Designer every time you change a resistor). Excel spreadsheets everywhere. Network drives, Google drives, USB sticks…

And whose job is it to update it anyway? All of this data is managed by different people in different systems.

Two years after your projects have been sent to manufacturing, something goes EOL, and you have to update the PCBs. Ideally, you'd update your library, and then simply pull the changes. But all your libraries and projects are a mess. And half of your latest MPNs are in the ERP system.

We've been through all of this, over and over. We've built ad-hoc tools that integrated with ERP systems and solved some of these problems. We've tried cloud offerings. Then, we've made Sideband.

Sideband keeps Symbols, Footprints, Components, Manufacturers, Manufacturer Part Numbers, Supplier data, and PCBs organised in a single unified relational data model. Sideband enabled us to keep all our data centrally organised, sync it with our ERP system, and have it always up-to-date for new product development in Altium Designer.

We built it for ourselves at Fermium because the alternatives were either a spreadsheet that didn't scale or a cloud PLM that was impossible to use and kept our data hostage. Neither would do.

So the brief was simple: a desktop app you download and run locally, made by electronics engineers for electronics engineers, reasonably priced.