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Can AI design circuit boards yet?

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Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#111

Post by corn-cheese »

For reasonably complex boards, it’s often not possible to know if it’ll work as intended until you have an assembled prototype in hand… even if you have the best SPICE and RF simulations ever, data sheets for many components can be missing important details, or components can have errata.

LLMs may be able to accelerate time to first prototype, but I don’t think it’ll be possible for them to revolutionise electronics design in the same way that’s happened for software - there’s not enough data, and it’s not cheap to gather more.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#112

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #103

I have 15+ years of PCB design experience. Mostly hobby stuff but a fair amount of processional work. Kilowatt range brushless motor controllers, basic RF stuff, lots of microcontroller stuff. I had Fable design an LED earring. Rechargeable coin cell, RP2350 cpu, IMU, 45 addressable LEDs. It made two mistakes - missed the through holes on the coin cell holder footprint and made the center pad too small. I was able to…

It's exciting. How long do you think it's going to be when electrical engineering is mostly going to be about verification of AI designs, and what are the tools out there to enable that?

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#113

Post by zorm »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #103

I have 15+ years of PCB design experience. Mostly hobby stuff but a fair amount of processional work. Kilowatt range brushless motor controllers, basic RF stuff, lots of microcontroller stuff. I had Fable design an LED earring. Rechargeable coin cell, RP2350 cpu, IMU, 45 addressable LEDs. It made two mistakes - missed the through holes on the coin cell holder footprint and made the center pad too small. I was able to…

As someone without PCB design experience but with dreams of physical things that could be made with PCBs this sounds amazing. What software are you using for the PCB design? Or just entirely letting Fable do whatever and checking the work with the browser page you mention?

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#115

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

corn-cheese wrote: post #111

For reasonably complex boards, it’s often not possible to know if it’ll work as intended until you have an assembled prototype in hand… even if you have the best SPICE and RF simulations ever, data sheets for many components can be missing important details, or components can have errata. LLMs may be able to accelerate time to first prototype, but I don’t think it’ll be possible for them to revolutionise electronics…

That sounds a great deal like what AI has done for software. Today in software, the work has gone from coming up with approaches and initial attempts to verification and making sure that what AI decided to do is fit for purpose.

The amount of skill needed has gone down dramatically.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#116

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

msuniverse2026 wrote: post #114

Lets say I do vibetronics - Who can I then send the schematics to, to have troubleshooting completed? Is there a service that is like "okay we'll take your high voltage nightmare and double check that it won't make magic smoke"?

There are a ton of cheap Chinese PCB fabs that will build it for you. Testing, of course, is still your own problem. I suspect you're going to have a hard time finding someone to take legal risks for you.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#117

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

Neywiny wrote: post #49
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?

They're 60 years old. The amount of training data on them is endless. Books, textbooks, videos, blog posts. The problem is when you want you do something that doesn't have 60 years of freely available documentation of their functions and applications

Like software, there's going to be a lot of pressure to use well documented tools within the model's training set. Innovation on the outputs may increase, but infrastructure and tooling will slow down.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#118

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #73
CyLith wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Moltbook; it also seems like OpenAI is experimenting with the agents communicating via wiki on topics like these.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#119

Post by SequoiaHope »

zorm wrote: post #113
SequoiaHope wrote: post #103

I have 15+ years of PCB design experience. Mostly hobby stuff but a fair amount of processional work. Kilowatt range brushless motor controllers, basic RF stuff, lots of microcontroller stuff. I had Fable design an LED earring. Rechargeable coin cell, RP2350 cpu, IMU, 45 addressable LEDs. It made two mistakes - missed the through holes on the coin cell holder footprint and made the center pad too small. I was able to…

As someone without PCB design experience but with dreams of physical things that could be made with PCBs this sounds amazing. What software are you using for the PCB design? Or just entirely letting Fable do whatever and checking the work with the browser page you mention?

The designs are in Kicad format, and the Kicad APIs are useful for Claude to work with. I would say that right now this involves a lot of knowledge about PCB design to do well, or for more detailed designs. However you might research how to design board for fabrication at JLCPCB and try something simple. Eg make a board with only LEDs in some pretty pattern and make it so you solder a raspberry pi Pico 2 to the board to drive it. Then you don’t have to worry about microcontroller work, just getting the LEDs placed. That is a little easier to get right. Just check the orientation of the LED footprint in the data sheet and make sure the four pins on the LED footprint match - and that there is a silkscreen dot on pin 1 of the LED. You can feed an agent this comment and it can check, though it’s good to check with your own eyes. You might ask it to screenshot the data sheet and the board footprint and display them side by side on the project web page for your review.

Put the LEDs in a cool pattern, slap a Pico on there, have your LLM program it, then dangle it off your backpack with a USB battery pack. Probably adding a motion sensor is easy enough.

Ask the LLM to make sure the board follows JLCPCB’s design rules, lists the LCSC part number for each part, verifies the parts are in stock, double checks every footprint, and makes sure the board passes DRC. Make sure it creates a schematic that is linked to the board design, and that the schematic is properly arranged in to logical blocks with clear connections the way a person would make a schematic - not a big array of parts with global labels for everything. Once it’s done, ask it to clean up the schematic and make it better. Repeat for the board layout. Ask it to review and look for issues multiple times. It will find them. Finally, take some time to doodle your own silkscreen art on there. Have fun! Note the Pico 2 is USB micro. For USB C, sparkfun or waveshare sell similar boards.

Also you can ask it to teach you! Ask a million questions and have it give you multimedia explainers.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#120

Post by SequoiaHope »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #112
SequoiaHope wrote: post #103

I have 15+ years of PCB design experience. Mostly hobby stuff but a fair amount of processional work. Kilowatt range brushless motor controllers, basic RF stuff, lots of microcontroller stuff. I had Fable design an LED earring. Rechargeable coin cell, RP2350 cpu, IMU, 45 addressable LEDs. It made two mistakes - missed the through holes on the coin cell holder footprint and made the center pad too small. I was able to…

It's exciting. How long do you think it's going to be when electrical engineering is mostly going to be about verification of AI designs, and what are the tools out there to enable that?

Electrical engineering will involve humans making specifications for a while the same way we do vibe software engineering today. Board design and layout will change but electrical engineering is about more than that.

For tools, I think the LLMs will outpace companies who built specialized tooling for this over the last couple years. Every six months we will see more progress than we saw in the last few years - for quite some time.

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