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Can AI design circuit boards yet?

eebench.org

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Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#71

Post by WarmWash »

Didn't do the PCB with ChatGPT, but did the analog circuitry for a 3 stage ultra low noise amp project I have been working on this past week using 5.6sol and 3.8 flash.

The models are excellent at doing maths, and excellent at thinking of fine details, but the design that was ultimately landed on was pretty excessive with lots of total overkill, which was met with lots of the familiar "Yeah, you're totally right, we don't need to do that".

5.6 did make a really nice BOM though, which even included quick reference explainers for what each part did. Pretty fancy.

We'll see when Astra comes around if it catches all these strange/useless choices.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#73

Post by NegativeLatency »

CyLith wrote: post #64
iopapa wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mysel…

Cool, is there any kind of community yet?

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#75

Post by BlackRabbit1 »

We tested pretty much all available "AI" board and schematic auto-layouters in the market. All failed even with the most basic tasks.

On the other side the latest frontier models are pretty strong in writing embedded C + Assembler code and debugging it afterwards. It's fun to watch it writing crazy complex 'gdb' plugins in Python. This improved brutally.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#76

Post by bbmatryoshka »

krupan wrote: post #62
bbmatryoshka wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

two istances of the same model, with low temperature, are infinitely more similar than any couple of human minds

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#77

Post by jacquesm »

luma wrote: post #28
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.

What did you make?

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#79

Post by kennyadam »

CyLith wrote: post #27

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 fair…

Are there any resources anyone could share that explain how LLMs can do things like design functioning circuits from next token prediction? I am totally baffled by how the models can complete so many varied and complex tasks without an actual understanding of what they're doing.

I saw a post about models posting on forums, chatting together about how to complete tasks. Behaviour that seems totally, well, human. Yet, it's all the most likely token and my brain hurts trying to understand how that can be.

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