Viewing profile — DHaldane

It's ok to build a compiler sometimes -- it's just very important to make that choice intentionally

This is an old story, rehashed without new information. That 7nm chip from SMIC is what prompted the export controls -- nobody thought they were close before that.

I've found the same thing - a little syntax example, some counter examples and generative AI does well generating syntactically correct code for PCB design. A lot of the netlists a…

Have you tried using more 4000x more samples? https://redwoodresearch.substack.com/p/getting-50-sota-on-ar...

I've found that for speeding up design generation like that, most of the utility comes from the coding approach. AI can't do it itself (yet), and having it call the higher level fu…

I promise that we want to stay a software company that helps people design things! Adding Skynetn't to company charter...

Agree that PDF digesting was the most useful. I think Gemini could definitely do that microphone study. Good test case! I remember spending 8 hours on DigiKey in the bad old times,…

Right - LLMs would be a bit silly for these cases. Both overkill and underkill. Current approach for length matching is throw it off to a domain specific solver. Example test-circu…

I doubt it too, but I notice that I keep underestimating the models. Do you have a challenge task I can try? What's the easiest thing I could get an LLM to do for circuit board des…

My gut agrees with you that LLMs shouldn't do this well on a specialty domain. But I think there's also the bitter lesson to be learned here: many times people say LLMs won't do we…

Update: Sonnet 3.5 is better than any other model for the circuit design and part finding tasks. Going to iterate a bit on the prompts to see how much I can push the new model on p…

It really depends on the type of question, but generally I'm between Gemini and Claude these days for most things.

That's an interesting question - I'll take a few pokes at it now to see if there's improvement.

I'll note that the bandwidth doubled from PCIe 4.0 to PCIe 5.0 (it's now 30GHz). Dealing with that speed increase is causing a whole lot of problems for all the designers in the ec…

Without knowing exactly what you are working on, here are a few ideas: 1. Figure out if you can do fewer slow iterations. What's driving the need for a full PCBA run for each itera…

Fascinating technology - if I interpret it correctly it looks like you're replacing lots of manual pipetting with a surface that can scooch little drops around using electrostatics…

Thanks for the feedback -- very helpful.

Seems right - Renesas just acquired Altium after all. Varies a lot by customer.

Good set of questions, and thanks for the feedback. Currently updating the website to add this stuff. Comments/answers to questions in order: 1. Yes, finding a single resistor is e…

Welp - seems there are out of date parts of the website. We launched router last Tuesday so have to update that we are end to end now. Thanks for the pointer!

Thanks Mike! We're still in VSCode -- thank you for kicking off that very first extension.

Hey - you got this very correct. Good insights as to what we're up to. Grueling to build product for the pros, but once done it can support a lot of people. Good automation can dis…

This is the classic SaaS CAD tool approach. But JITX runs locally - all design data stays local and we're not holding it hostage in our cloud. Definitely agree with a free version …

Schematics ended up being a hard requirement, so we put in the work to generate good ones automatically and the tools for EEs to adjust the aesthetics without ruining the correctne…