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AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
21–30 of 194 posts
Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
#22In case anyone feels déjà vu, Popular Mechanics wrote about this professor's lab in Jan 2025, with almost the same title: "AI Designed Computer Chips That the Human Mind Can't Understand".
I feel a bit of unease when I read this title, not because of the threat of AI, but because the prevailing aphorism that "RF is black magic" is a slap in the face to the millions of physicists and RF engineers who DO understand every bit of this. It's a fun harmless anti-intellectual saw that I don't believe is harmless at all. We need more RF engineers and telling people it's all "black magic" and "wizardry" (and worst of all, saying "even RF engineers don't understand RF") makes it seem like it's not worth studying.
Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
#23Chips? I've tried to task Opus, Gemini and Codex with a simple PCB. All of them placed holes correctly but can't understand that the traces should not cross physically.
Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
#24The comments here are trending towards "There's nothing new here, I could design 5g radio chips with a cheap linux box running FTP".
Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
#25I’m a bit frustrated. AI can do a looot of things; but I think as we continue to muddy the waters between LLMs and more traditional machine learning like Monte Carlo, Genetic Algoriths, Expert Systems and other Statistics magic tricks, we’re too aggressively conflating established and morally neutral activities in ML with the concerns that people have about LLMs and Stable Diffusion.
Though I also imagine that that is the point.
Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
#26If you don't know how it works, then you don't know that it works.
Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
#27Chips? I've tried to task Opus, Gemini and Codex with a simple PCB. All of them placed holes correctly but can't understand that the traces should not cross physically.
Read the article.
Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
#28I’m a bit frustrated. AI can do a looot of things; but I think as we continue to muddy the waters between LLMs and more traditional machine learning like Monte Carlo, Genetic Algoriths, Expert Systems and other Statistics magic tricks, we’re too aggressively conflating established and morally neutral activities in ML with the concerns that people have about LLMs and Stable Diffusion. Though I also imagine that that i…
It is a problem because people will talk about what AI can do implying that an LLM can do that thing, making it seem like a pure LLM can do almost anything. On the other hand people will say AI will never be able to do X because an LLM can’t do that thing well natively. AI has become too vague of a term to be useful.
Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
#29We have always known the old trick of genetic algorithms to produce better radio chips. The problem isn’t the design: its manufacturing restraints. This is nothing new or impressive.
Then why can't these constraints be encoded into the selection/scoring function ?
Re: AI learns the “dark art” of RFIC design
#30Chips? I've tried to task Opus, Gemini and Codex with a simple PCB. All of them placed holes correctly but can't understand that the traces should not cross physically.
The AI in the article isn't an LLM.