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Can AI design circuit boards yet?

eebench.org

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Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#51

Post by alex7o »

I have a circuit board on my bench designed and ordered from china for 1h (manufacturing+ shipping took 14days), fable designed it I think or sol don't remember anymore but it was in claude code. I told it to benchmark different kicad autoroute tools and I picked the routes I liked the best, with a bit of changes. It feels like magic to be able to go from idea toa physical thing in such a short amount of time. The board works I made some mistakes the ai had made some mistakes but mostly stuff I could fix with some soldering, also one parts datasheet was wrong but I couldn't have known that without ai.

But I started like others, I would build manually, then run drc then sleep on it and check again and ask an llm to double check for me then order. Llms catch quite a few things but like with code like to make things more complicated than that have to be.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#52

Post by hdhdbdbdxk »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #35

Interesting. AI may be pretty good at managing the gazillion different things that make up circuit boards. Frankly, I am surprised that it isn't already a solved problem, as we've had silicon compilers, for many years, and I always figured that IC design is more difficult than PCB.

Digital silicon design is fairly simple in principle. It's hard because there are billions of transistors to route

PCB design on the other hand more often then not has outside constrains like mechanical, thermal an RF design

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#54

Post by iopapa »

krupan wrote: post #34

I'm confused. Who made this benchmark and why? It is fascinating to me that people are putting this much work into trying to measure and evaluate LLMs when we've never gone to this level for humans. Sounds like they also built a harness/feedback loop so the LLM knows if it's doing a good job? Again, why didn't anyone ever do this for human engineers?

We spent a lot time evaluating which model is the best to use in our atopile agent harness and thought the benchmark and results are interesting enough to share.

Evaluating a model for specific use-cases like this that are bit more broad scope than a lot of typical microbenchmarks turned out to be quite the challenge.

Determining deterministically what a "good" electrical design is non-trivial and most electrical-engineers rely on good ol' intuition and decade long experience, so we tried to formalize it.

The only reason it was somewhat possible within a reasonable amount of effort is because atopile provides most of the complicated infrastructure for the benchmark: constraint solver, simulation, code-first electronics modeling, erc & drc checks, high level models of passive electronics components etc

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#57

Post by embedding-shape »

Interesting that on their current leaderboard (https://eebench.org/), GPT-5.6 Sol scores just above GPT-5.4 but below GPT-5.5, the only benchmark that shows that 5.6 is worse than 5.5 on something?

That the table contains what seems to be absolute numbers for score, cost/task, time/task and output tokens, makes it seem like they've only made one run for each task/model combo, but that can't be right, right? I don't see any mentions of how many times they run each task, so if it's just one run per task/model, isn't this more noisy than useful?

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#58

Post by laybak »

embedding-shape wrote: post #57

Interesting that on their current leaderboard ( https://eebench.org/ ), GPT-5.6 Sol scores just above GPT-5.4 but below GPT-5.5, the only benchmark that shows that 5.6 is worse than 5.5 on something? That the table contains what seems to be absolute numbers for score, cost/task, time/task and output tokens, makes it seem like they've only made one run for each task/model combo, but that can't be right, right? I don't…

yeah noticed the same. I wonder if this will be a recurring theme for model releases: each release specializes on a set of headline benchmarks, along with regression in benchmarks that are less of a priority

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#60

Post by Scene_Cast2 »

I found LLMs circa 4 months ago to be decent at textbook-style electronics, but they choke at anything nontrivial. They approach things like someone that knows the undergrad and grad textbooks, but has absolutely zero experience. No ability to answer questions such as "is this adequate", "do I need a LPF here", "how do I kill resonance without increasing impedance", etc.

I'm guessing that this is due to a lack of RL and data.

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