If you give it a real solver to drive and business constraints to operate under, it will do pretty good job (which is to map your business rules to constraints and balanced costs, develop deterministic tests, probabilistic tests, acceptance gates, all boring stuff).
Can AI design circuit boards yet?
11–20 of 223 posts
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#12I know a startup [1] that tries to accomplish this. [1] https://www.schematik.io/
Love the democratization of access. Still curious how this is better vs gpt 6 astra or grok 4.7 in the future trained on spacex problems ?
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#13I have tried to use AI on this from GPT3, documenting a few of the attempts on my blog. They know the datasheets and the theory enough to be extremely useful at the start, but the most recent ones are becoming scary good. Routing a PCB is certainly a bit more than joining some wires, you have to accommodate power traces, ground loops, component overlap and all the various RF tricks and tips, but I do believe we are less than a year from prompt to full assembly including enclosure.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#14I got a flexpcb that validates in JLC and PCBWay DRC tools from the KiCAD MCP Server and Codex.
I have yet to order any or program it, but it was enough to make me push on with a PCB art project for ST-style guitar pickguards - no netlist, no problems.
I'm also foolishly toying with NeXTBus dev boards for the Cube. Is it cursed? Probably. https://github.com/itomato/NeXTBus-Dev-Board
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#15Just 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…
I never thought about it until now, but as someone with zero skill in this domain I feel interested in making my own vibetronics now.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#16I got a flexpcb that validates in JLC and PCBWay DRC tools from the KiCAD MCP Server and Codex. I have yet to order any or program it, but it was enough to make me push on with a PCB art project for ST-style guitar pickguards - no netlist, no problems. I'm also foolishly toying with NeXTBus dev boards for the Cube. Is it cursed? Probably. https://github.com/itomato/NeXTBus-Dev-Board
Sweet, do you have the pickguard project live somewhere? I want to check it out!
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#17I got a flexpcb that validates in JLC and PCBWay DRC tools from the KiCAD MCP Server and Codex. I have yet to order any or program it, but it was enough to make me push on with a PCB art project for ST-style guitar pickguards - no netlist, no problems. I'm also foolishly toying with NeXTBus dev boards for the Cube. Is it cursed? Probably. https://github.com/itomato/NeXTBus-Dev-Board
How do I subsribe to learn the result of this test. I'm very keen to try this.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#18I'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!
> I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs.
Eurisko was used for VLSI chip design, then used rules discovered there to design TCS Traveler winning fleet.
It is unbelievable how artificial intelligence walk in circles.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#19I got a flexpcb that validates in JLC and PCBWay DRC tools from the KiCAD MCP Server and Codex. I have yet to order any or program it, but it was enough to make me push on with a PCB art project for ST-style guitar pickguards - no netlist, no problems. I'm also foolishly toying with NeXTBus dev boards for the Cube. Is it cursed? Probably. https://github.com/itomato/NeXTBus-Dev-Board
I've gone through this same workflow and had success all the way through DRC ruleset passing with JLCPCB-based settings, ordering, fab, and use.
Board was ordered with PCBA (they did assembly of the stock components) and I did SMD for just the oddball module/ICs they don't stock. Works exactly to design.
My boards are for hobby use and are ridiculously simple though compared to anything professional (breakout boards for specific components in FPV drone video transmission subsystems). That's probably an important detail. I think its like anything else in AI right now. It can do it 90% of the time but that 10% can be really rough and if its a task you can't do or verify yourself, you won't know the difference.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
Yes but I'm not so concerned with how people name these steps.