Not exactly in the the same class as PCBs, but I've had a lot of success with Codex and Claude producing Fritzing diagrams. I've even got a skill set up with Claude so that it follows my preferences with breadboard wiring, using bezier curves to avoid wires crossing. Also, if it can't find a component in the library, it's quite happy drawing svgs of its own.
Can AI design circuit boards yet?
61–70 of 221 posts
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#62I'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?
because human engineers are not reproducible, so having an accurate measure of the skills of one of them has a much lower utility return (those benchmarks are very expensive to run, and making them for humans will be at least as much expensive)
Are you saying LLMs are reproducible? I seem to get at least a slightly different answer every time I ask the same question
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#63I 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…
Old textbooks. They love 741 op-amps, etc.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#64A 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 fair…
Claude is surprisingly good at discrete digital design with 74xxx, wonder what it trained on. Did you run it on anything else digital?
I'm having it help design a 68k computer similar in spirit to the original Mac (the spirit being a tightly coupled video subsystem that time-shares the CPU bus), but updated with more modern peripherals, like PS/2 and SD cards. It's got the design more or less done, but the routing will be a nightmare. I'm not ready to just gamble on it having gotten everything right, so I will be doing a thorough design review myself and re-deriving all the timing analysis.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#65Would be good to see the full details of the tasks / methodology used. https://eebench.org/methodology.html makes this unclear.
> A real capacitor makes the task more interesting. A ceramic part may provide much less than its advertised capacitance once it has voltage across it. Parts have tolerances. Adding more capacitance costs more, takes up space and makes the rail slower to recharge when the power returns. A design that works with nominal values can fail with the parts that arrive.
It sounds like from a reasonable reading of the benchmark post that there's some things that are being tested that are assumed to be criteria that you expect the models to intuitively find those things to be important (i.e. the stuff about working on parts that have tolerances etc.). If that's so, then this really feels like mostly an exploration of whether an LLM has a good understanding of unstated constraints and has an appropriate in distribution set of priors that would be able to form models where it's reasonable to design on those lines.
It's hard to tell whether this is a problem though as the methodology is imprecise.
If you're spending time on evals against your own product, I'd be super curious to see how far you can get to by using a top tier model to produce generalized instructions for lower tier models. E.g. in a loop: "This eval missed X. what's the simplest single instruction that would have helped this session consider that as necessary that can benefit all future runs. Stick that in AGENTS.md and retest."
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#66Interesting 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…
If you look at the score distribution, Grok and Opus 5 especially stand out for doing consistently well and rarely ever scoring under 50%. Basically they always at give you something that at least works.
Most others, especially and famously Fable 5.1, seem to have a fair chance of completely failing, despite also sometimes excelling.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#67Not PCB layout, but I've been building CircuitLab Assistant (https://www.circuitlab.com/), a chat window 100% integrated with our schematic editor and simulation engine. Can build / modify a schematic, troubleshoot, answer questions, configure simulations, etc.
If anyone wants to try an early beta, reply with your CircuitLab username and I'll get you set up. We know have a lot more to do, but would love some feedback on this early version!
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#68Interesting 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…
We run each model multiple times against each challenge and take the average score. We include the variance below the score in the leaderboard.
GPT 5.5: 42.3±10.1 GPT 5.6 sol: 39.4±8.7
We were also surprised by the low sol score but it seems consistent with our experience in using it in the field in atopile as agent in our harness. In general OpenAI models didn't do too well on electronics, which seems to change now with GPT-6 Astra. Results are in soon!
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#69I've been tinkering with a personal project over the past year.
I have no experience and I'm slowly failing forward with the help of YouTube, KiCad and patience.
I've had three rounds of PCB's from an online supplier, only to discover issues related to my own understanding of the components in each version.
In my latest iteration I've been leaning on some standard models (Gemini and Claude) and they have inspected my schematics and spotted some errors and instructed me on how to address them, as well as advised on how to make use of some components I wasn't aware I needed.
What I will say... they didn't design anything, I've done that myself, but they have been a good tool to bounce ideas off of.
Time will tell if I will get something usable this time around!
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#70It is 3 years later and these AIs have not produced anything meaningful.