Can AI design circuit boards yet?
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Can AI design circuit boards yet?
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Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#2I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs.
The next pain-point is sourcing the components from Digikey, LCSC, etc., and finding suitable substitutes if necessary.
Of course this assumes the LLMs can already read datasheets because that's the biggest pain-point in designing electronics. It's like filling out tax forms.
Finally it would be great if LLMs could extract simulation models from datasheets!
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#3I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs. The next pain-point is sourcing the components from Digikey, LCSC, etc., and finding suitable substitutes if necessary. Of course this assumes the LLMs can already read datasheets because that's the biggest pain-point in designing electronics. It's like filling out tax forms. Finally it would be great if LLMs could extract simulation models from datasheets!
Routing is the easiest part of layout, and there have been auto-routers (which mostly worked) for a long time now; the difficult task is in placing components, and adjusting those placements.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#4I know a startup [1] that tries to accomplish this.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#5I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs. The next pain-point is sourcing the components from Digikey, LCSC, etc., and finding suitable substitutes if necessary. Of course this assumes the LLMs can already read datasheets because that's the biggest pain-point in designing electronics. It's like filling out tax forms. Finally it would be great if LLMs could extract simulation models from datasheets!
Routing is the easiest part of layout, and there have been auto-routers (which mostly worked) for a long time now; the difficult task is in placing components, and adjusting those placements.
Sure, I was just using "route" to mean also floorplanning because that's what Astra's routing tool also does. Not sure how they name it. Sorry if I was sloppy.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#6I have found that AI is great for sorting out your libraries, drawing and helping double check footprints managing your BOM. I still draw my schematics and layout my boards. I haven’t found it any good for those tasks yet. There are too many stupid errors it makes. I do get it to review my work though and often it catches things I have missed.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#7Just as some anecdatum, I've tried this a couple of times over the last few years. 2024-2025, no body could generate anything of any sort of complexity, however maybe around the Opus 4.7 timeline, I tried having it generate some relatively simple and one slightly more complex circuit around 8-bit PIC micros, and was very pleasantly surprised. The schematics for simpler stuff is usually OK, often with some of the kind of crazy belt-and-suspenders stuff you see in code (how many decoupling caps do I actually need here, Claude?), and PCB layout has basically been terrible every time I've tried it.
Recent models can generate mostly competent schematics if you're using well known parts, feed them data sheets (and you _must_ feed them the errata too) and it's not too complex. Any complexity analog or RF, everything falls down quickly if you know what you're looking at. Maybe Astra will do better? There's still so much implicit knowledge that a good designer (not me by a long shot, but I know a little) will bake into a board, and even as cheap as JCLPCB is now, you don't want to have to spin a half dozen revs because Claude or Codex hallucinated. It will be genuinely interesting to see what happens on this front.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Routing is the easiest part of layout, and there have been auto-routers (which mostly worked) for a long time now; the difficult task is in placing components, and adjusting those placements.
Sure, I was just using "route" to mean also floorplanning because that's what Astra's routing tool also does. Not sure how they name it. Sorry if I was sloppy.
Not at all, but the term for routing and placing the components is ‘layout’. Floorplanning usually refers to the laying out of larger blocks of the circuit (with the blocks themselves already having been laid-out).
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#9Have tried this a few times. While AI has been helpful in talking through component choices and other topics, it’s consistently been a spectacular fail each time in actually designing the board.
I’ve had similar results asking AI to design 3D models for 3D printing.
“Coach me on optimizing error on my printer”… helps.
“Build me a print ready file to these specs.”… it’s like a drunk cat attacked my computer. Just confidently puts out total nonsense.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#10I think the new Astra computer use demos show that the models might be able to do things like inspection of real world objects if given a camera.
Super excited to see real world feedback added into the agent loops we have gotten used to working with. Could you let the model print and test the circuit boards it is prototyping with a jig?