I fancy making a custom ARM or RISC-V chip design, is AI any good for that?
Can AI design circuit boards yet?
151–160 of 220 posts
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#152im using this project called konnect to do what the post title says and it works well enough. going to only get better i assume.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#153We 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.
I find it's (Sol at least, probably also Fable) great at writing Skidl schematics, evaluating PCB layout work and operating lab equipment while testing board (scope, psu, load, debugger)
For reviewing schematic/boards I recently developed something for internal tests:
1. A frontier model (either Opensource or closed source) gets a load of text to review a Kicad project systematically
2. The frontier model can extremely "ask" a cheap Gemini vision model to give it data from datasheets or specs.
Main problem: the quality dramatically hits the shitter done once it falls back to "pdf2latext" due to complex tables.
It was even able to do complex ngspice simulations. But you must offer it all datasheet PDFs.
$1-2 of tokens saved me from $70-80 bugged PCBs.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#154I did this recently - https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/03/twelve-dev-boards-from-o...
Instead of trying to vibe it all - I got Claude to write deterministic scripts for creating the boards.
And did this before trying to completely vibe it: https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/12/vibing-hardware
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I have both Altium and Kicad experience. Can you explain further how you are setting up the AI to interface with KiCad? Is your AI having keyboard/mouse access or are you doing it only through API? Not familiar with Claude interface.
I have had good success with Claude Code combined with https://github.com/mixelpixx/Konnect. I still need to do routing manually but it is quite useful for reviews of the design and even of the final PCB.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#156As long as you keep in the loop Claude can do anything. Question is can it do stuff in which you are not in the loop. For simple tasks yes, but not for complex ones yet.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it's (Sol at least, probably also Fable) great at writing Skidl schematics, evaluating PCB layout work and operating lab equipment while testing board (scope, psu, load, debugger)
For reviewing schematic/boards I recently developed something for internal tests: 1. A frontier model (either Opensource or closed source) gets a load of text to review a Kicad project systematically 2. The frontier model can extremely "ask" a cheap Gemini vision model to give it data from datasheets or specs. Main problem: the quality dramatically hits the shitter done once it falls back to "pdf2latext" due to compl…
Not sure why the complicated setup with Gemini. I assume you are on a Codex or Claude plan (100 or 200 EUR/USD/m). The model will just pull datasheets and use a combination of conversion to text and looking at bitmap renderings of the PDF. Haven't had that dramatic quality issue you mentioned. When the model isn't sure, it will just keep looking until it understands the datasheet clearly. But yes, it needs the datasheets.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#158A 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,…
Humans essentially do "next token prediction" too - there's always a choice between the next actions to take and they pick a good one based on what has happened in the past.
That doesn't really limit how clever we can get internally when picking the next action.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
You fell for the stochastic parrot meme and next token over simplification. That's the explanation.
That's just derision, not an explanation. And it's a bad way to treat someone humbly trying to learn.
It kind of is an explanation though - the explanation is that they believed the stochastic parrot / "just" next token prediction nonsense, and that those are actually not true.
You can ask for a deeper explanation of why they aren't true I guess.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#160> This has worked much better for us than asking a model to draw lines in a GUI. It also means the benchmark can spend less time testing computer use and more time testing electronics.
this is key I think - I use it for graphics tasks - it sucks at graphical environments - always use some text based representation, not really surprising I suppose. chatgpt even suggested I'll use the text representation, claude said how about I give you svg and you convert it, they seem to know.