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Can AI design circuit boards yet?

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Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#131

Post by luma »

jacquesm wrote: post #77
luma wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Extending this work: https://github.com/aderusha/dewalt_wtc

MEMS vibration sensor to stick to a sander or saw etc that can control power on an attached dust collector. Most of the work is focused on low power for year+ battery life and a weird idea for end user input that may or may not work out well. Got device on bench but the first time bring up is going to take some time that I'm leaving for tomorrow.

I now have Astra to review 5.6s work, no glaring errors found.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#134

Post by mrshadowgoose »

kennyadam wrote: post #79
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,…

Look up "mechanistic interpretability" in the context of LLMs. The next token prediction machinery is just a foundation for a higher order learned structure that appears to encode specific concepts, regardless of input language.

The analogy to humans is that the human brain is "just atoms bouncing around", but there's unquestionably something "more" going on that just that.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#135

Post by idiotsecant »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #129
SequoiaHope wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I think generative board design will become better packaged, trained, and validated, and that it will be common place for electrical engineers to rely more on these tools. Major vendors like Altium will add tools like this and their use will become commonplace in industry. For hobbyists, you will be able to specify a board design in natural language and have it completed with unprecedented ease. I’m excited to he…

Yeah. I'm expecting that we fully automate cognition in the medium to long run. I think it's inevitable. With the advances in math, I'm also hoping we can automate fundamental physics. Just ask for the physics needed for better fusion, no need for human toil. If we play this right, the AI can fully take care of all our needs, and reaping the rewards of what it does when we stop being able to keep up with the rate of…

This is a big leap. So far LLMs are really good at turning training data into accurate results. The more data, the better. LLMs are very, very bad at making intuitive leaps based on the 'shape' of sparse data- a technique that is, to be fair, pretty rare in humans as well, but essential to progress. Maybe they can make up for it with brute force and the precision and breadth of knowledge that only an LLM can have, we'll see.

I don't think we've nailed the architecture that will allow things like generalized self directed training, yet, which is what would be needed for something like 'make fusion better'

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#136

Post by jacquesm »

luma wrote: post #131
jacquesm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you make?

Extending this work: https://github.com/aderusha/dewalt_wtc MEMS vibration sensor to stick to a sander or saw etc that can control power on an attached dust collector. Most of the work is focused on low power for year+ battery life and a weird idea for end user input that may or may not work out well. Got device on bench but the first time bring up is going to take some time that I'm leaving for tomorrow. I now have…

That is so cool.

I'm doing weird stuff with robotics, llms and obsolete languages, your project seems a lot more practical :)

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#137

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

idiotsecant wrote: post #135
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I'm expecting that we fully automate cognition in the medium to long run. I think it's inevitable. With the advances in math, I'm also hoping we can automate fundamental physics. Just ask for the physics needed for better fusion, no need for human toil. If we play this right, the AI can fully take care of all our needs, and reaping the rewards of what it does when we stop being able to keep up with the rate of…

This is a big leap. So far LLMs are really good at turning training data into accurate results. The more data, the better. LLMs are very, very bad at making intuitive leaps based on the 'shape' of sparse data- a technique that is, to be fair, pretty rare in humans as well, but essential to progress. Maybe they can make up for it with brute force and the precision and breadth of knowledge that only an LLM can have, we…

Are you sure about that?

They seem to be able to make intuitive leaps pretty well. They need to make the same leaps over and over, though, because they lack online learning, so the discoveries only persist after the next training cycle. Context only goes so far.

We're pouring billions into solving that, though, so I would be surprised if we don't get there soon.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#138

Post by CamperBob2 »

akiselev wrote: post #86
kennyadam wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Yet, it's all the most likely token and my brain hurts trying to understand how that can be. You and everyone else. That's the great mystery of transformer architectures as applied to language. To be clear though, they're only good at schematic capture , which is very much a textual representation. Most of the data basically boils down to netlists, which are a text based format mapping connections between abstract…

Where LLMs completely break down is the next step, PCB routing.

No. Take a look at https://www.eevblog.com/forum/eda/claude-code-for-pcb-design... . Fable did that by working directly on an EAGLE .brd file (well, "directly" by writing a Python program to do it, but still.)

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#139

Post by merlincorey »

a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #115
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.

The skill floor has gone down dramatically, but the skill ceiling is still quite high depending on the domain.

Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?

#140

Post by a2ff6eeb0 »

merlincorey wrote: post #139
a2ff6eeb0 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The skill floor has gone down dramatically, but the skill ceiling is still quite high depending on the domain.

I'm not sure how true that is. When Claude made progress on the Riemann conjecture, here are the kind of prompts used:

> Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”).2 This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.

It seems like the kind of prompts a high schooler could come up with. What kind of problems were you thinking of as high skill?

https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta

The full transcript is here: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/8a0d1add3c637b858a9a181e98c40e...

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