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Can AI design circuit boards yet?

eebench.org

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Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#21

Post by iopapa »

dennis16384 wrote: post #11

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).

Really excited about constraint solvers making a comeback! Especially after seeing Z3 getting a mention in anthropics fermat post. EEbench is using atopile's internal constraint solver for engineering parameters (think operating temperature, voltage ranges, stacked tolerances etc).

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#22

Post by sitzkrieg »

cmiles8 wrote: post #9

Have 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 conf…

LLMs like to fail spectacularly at real life measurement and not tell you about it as well

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#23

Post by samuelbeek »

AdriaanvRossum wrote: post #4

I know a startup [1] that tries to accomplish this. [1] https://www.schematik.io/

Mostly focused on BOM, schematics, and firmware now but slowly expanding to circuit boards if we feel we can deliver real value there. Early experiments with Astra are promising

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#25

Post by itomato »

KingFelix wrote: post #16
itomato wrote: post #14

I 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!

npm run art

https://github.com/wjkennedy/stratopcb/tree/main

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#26

Post by david_rugaex »

andrewchambers wrote: post #10

I 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?

In July I was struggling with writing DIY Rust firmware for an e-ink screen. I mistakenly thought I'd ordered an Inkplate 6 ED060SC7 and actually had the later version, which confounded my efforts. I was also mistaken about the pixel resolution.

The way I found this out is I propped it up next to a webcam so it was more or less full frame, and I had the (then new) Fable write a python script to bezier warp the camera capture to a flat projection of the screen. At that point I couldn't address the whole screen. Once I'd guided the capture script I just left the LLM overnight with the instruction to get full control confirmed by a capture round trip, and it was meaningfully finished in a couple of hours. I don't really have the skills to attempt that myself in a reasonable time frame.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#27

Post by CyLith »

A personal data point: I had Claude Opus 4.8 design a fairly textbook circuit that outputs a monochrome image burned in an EEPROM over standard 640x480 VGA using only 74 series logic and GALs. It designed the circuit and GAL code, and I did the routing, and got it made through JLC for $6. After it came back, there was one error that was not caught, which I could blue-wire, and it works just fine otherwise. I was fairly impressed.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#28

Post by luma »

itomato wrote: post #14

I 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

Flying home today and got DHL notification that my vibe PCBs are on my porch. Now to try to program, bring up, and see if it works this weekend. $178 for 5 assembled units from PCBway to run this dumb experiment.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#29

Post by iopapa »

amelius wrote: post #2

I'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!

Sourcing parts has been a huge motivation for this. We are still pretty jarred by the supply chain crisis a few years ago. Having the ability to formally verify that an alternative part fulfills the original design constraints is huge.

Not sure whether you played with llm datasheet extraction lately, but they are working their way up there. Even started reasoning about curves and footnotes.

Where do you think is the biggest pain point: part discovery, datasheet verification or substitute determination?

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#30

Post by throwaway219450 »

goosethe wrote: post #24

the answer is a resounding yes: https://github.com/seanwevans/pynq_butterfly

For stuff like this, definitely. It’s already exciting. Claude et al are surprisingly competent with real hardware. I’ve also had good success debugging basic issues with micros - not via the debugger, but giving datasheet and written analysis. I’m sure it could do things like capture from a connected oscilloscope (Salaeae have an MCP integration for their logic tools). Also for SPICE which I never bother with because the tools always felt stuck in the 90s, but having some serious automated analog review would be nice. I’m really excited to play with peripherals like the RP2040 or Beaglebone real time logic blocks, or improving/adding real USB support instead of USB serial.

For circuits I would trust a netlist or DRC/ERC review, checking a design against reference circuit values, probably not placement as that tends to be guided straight from a datasheet where it makes a difference and I like the artistic side of it.

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