Interesting, I would think it would work much better results with myhdl, nmigen or systemC since LLMs already do python and c fairly well. Has anyone tried LLMs with verilog or spice yet?
Can AI design circuit boards yet?
231–240 of 252 posts
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#232I 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…
> I think big things are coming for this world and by and large they are not ready for it. With regard to PCB design, I'm curious if can you add more color to how the world isn't ready for this in particular? I don't think I quite grasp all the ramifications of AI becoming PCB design experts.
I can speak from experience here (I’ve been around small-scale electronics design/manufacturing for decades via my father’s business and was hands-on with it on an ag-IoT project for about 10 years).
The limiting factor in electronics/PCB development and manufacturing isn’t engineering expertise (there are plenty of sufficiently competent electronics engineers in the world, especially in Asia), nor parts/materials or assembly costs. It’s the endlessly laborious grunt work of testing a design and making minor improvements until it is finally ready for volume production. That process can easily take a year or two even for a fairly simple design. Even a really skilled/experienced engineer can make a simple mistake in a schematic or PCB layout, which only gets picked up weeks later when prototypes are assembled and tested, or even later when a batch has been made and shipped to customers. So, each design-assemble-test cycle takes weeks/months, and each testing/diagnosing/repairing session takes hours or days. And it mostly has to be undertaken by degree-qualified engineers or experienced technicians.
And that’s mostly before you’ve written all the firmware, which is incredibly laborious in its own right.
The outcome is that only very large companies with big sales volumes can afford to do it (or niche players able to sell at huge margins, most commonly in defense or medical industries).
Outside of those sectors, it’s now just not really viable to be a small-medium business selling moderate volumes of units anymore, the way it was in the 80s-90s. I’ve seen it up close in agricultural IoT. There are no big/dominant players (customer needs are too heterogeneous and distribution is so hard). There are many small vendors, but they find it hard to make products that work well and that customers love, especially at a price point most growers will go for. So, no vendors are big commercial winners and not many customers are very happy - even though there’s a great need for technology in this sector. And it’s really not because the vendors and their engineers are incompetent; it’s just really hard.
With AI to take care of so much of the grunt work involved with circuit/schematic design, PCB layout, pre-manufacturing verification, testing, and firmware dev, it’s realistic to me that you could cut down on R&D costs by 90%, make it much faster to get products onto the market, and make it possible for so many more high-quality niche products to be commercially viable.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#233[flagged]
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
NP-complete means that it's easy to test if we're right, but because of that complexity we can't always find a valid solution to test within a predictable period of time. Both circuit board routing and computer vision are variations on the same fundamental problems. Once we solve we, we solve the other. However, when I was growing up most serious computer scientists believed that CV (computer vision) was a 'hard' pro…
In your opinion, do you think ai can make eutorack modules by now? This is what I am waiting for: explain an idea to an ai, and sending the files to jlpcb to receive a complete working module (minus some THC soldering)
I'm sure that the best models can glue some basic synthesizer functions together, but I wouldn't waste a minute on anything less than Fable/Astra-class models for that kind of application, and I wouldn't expect the result to work the first time. It could get expensive.
Here's a question - are there software simulators for things like Eurorack modules? That would make the question somewhat more interesting, since you wouldn't have to build the circuit (or pay someone else to assemble it) to hear how it sounds. It strikes me that SPICE-like algorithms should be fast enough to do this kind of thing in real time now.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to see that chat log, and the final board. To be fair I've only been testing on nontrivial PCBs with 6+ layers and I haven't had the luck you have. > FWIW - Computer vision is also NP complete, but we do that all the time now. I have no idea what you mean by this. What's your definition of NP complete?
NP-complete means that it's easy to test if we're right, but because of that complexity we can't always find a valid solution to test within a predictable period of time. Both circuit board routing and computer vision are variations on the same fundamental problems. Once we solve we, we solve the other. However, when I was growing up most serious computer scientists believed that CV (computer vision) was a 'hard' pro…
[deleted]
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Shattering changes to societal structure are coming.
It's like inflation for quality of life. Right now we're in the stimulus check phase, and people feel great about having been handed some cash. The next step is that cash has been spent, and what's remaining isn't worth anything.
And just like welfare bucks, people will quickly grow accustomed to getting their "intelligence" handed to them from the machine, while their own intelligence atrophies. Breeding dependency
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think big things are coming for this world and by and large they are not ready for it. With regard to PCB design, I'm curious if can you add more color to how the world isn't ready for this in particular? I don't think I quite grasp all the ramifications of AI becoming PCB design experts.
I can speak from experience here (I’ve been around small-scale electronics design/manufacturing for decades via my father’s business and was hands-on with it on an ag-IoT project for about 10 years). The limiting factor in electronics/PCB development and manufacturing isn’t engineering expertise (there are plenty of sufficiently competent electronics engineers in the world, especially in Asia), nor parts/materials or…
I don't understand your argument. PCB design is not that hard you can learn how to do it in a month or so. JLCPCB can print (or even assemble) PCBs for next to nothing. Irrespective of AI it seems easier than ever to produce prototypes right now.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if I need .. just one?
You can do that just fine. You can order a minimum of five PCBs and choose to have only two assembled. Then you'll get three unpopulated PCBs and two assembled ones. That's a way to get finished PCBs very cheaply. Be aware that every component that you use that is not in their basic and preferred extended parts library incurs a one-time three-dollar fee. This hurts disproportionately if your entire design is low coun…
Or just order the parts with their sister company LCSC and assemble yourself. It's not that hard especially if you have a hot air gun!
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#239I'm still cold on this for two reasons
1. PCB review subreddit gets posts from people who use Claude to design the whole thing with 3D renders. Looks amazing. But uses auto router and 20 connections are left open. Claude said they needed to be fixed manually but the user didn't even read, just posted the whole GitHub and expected volunteers to fix it
2. Another project used Claude to design the PCB. After assembly the usb c port melted. I can see (via GitHub) photos being posted to Claude, Claude commenting that they're not sure if it's a current issue or a soldering problem (short), so " just leave the usb c port out for now". Zero evidence of the user using their brain or pulling out a multimeter.
PCB design is not that hard. People trying to offload this to AI are also unwilling or unable to put in the work to actually diagnose issues and finish the project. Unlike code, you cannot chuck hundreds of dollars at Claude until it "solves" PCB because it has no way to test its changes.
Re: Can AI design circuit boards yet?
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can speak from experience here (I’ve been around small-scale electronics design/manufacturing for decades via my father’s business and was hands-on with it on an ag-IoT project for about 10 years). The limiting factor in electronics/PCB development and manufacturing isn’t engineering expertise (there are plenty of sufficiently competent electronics engineers in the world, especially in Asia), nor parts/materials or…
I don't understand your argument. PCB design is not that hard you can learn how to do it in a month or so. JLCPCB can print (or even assemble) PCBs for next to nothing. Irrespective of AI it seems easier than ever to produce prototypes right now.
Yes, you can learn PCB design “in a month”, design your board and get a batch of prototypes made up by JLCPCB. All of that takes 2-3 months absolute minimum. Then you have to test the boards. You need a lot of costly equipment and expertise to test the board and fix any problems with it. That can take days to weeks of work. Then ordering your next batch of prototypes carries a 2-4 week turnaround time including shipping. Repeat this for any design error or just any improvement you want to make once you’ve tried working with it for a bit.
Then you have to write the firmware. That’s weeks or months of work. (And much of the embedded firmware code I’ve seen come out of small business engineering departments or consulting shops is terrible, because they don’t have the time/budget or organizational structure that delivers clean, readable, well-structured, well abstracted C code.)
All this is before you get an MVP into the hands of your customers. Then you start getting customer feedback and have to start making more improvements.
“Never been easier” it may well be to get a hobby project prototypes. But for a product with any amount of serious functionality, it’s at least months and likely 1-2 years to get anything into volume production.
But the potential for saving huge amounts of time particularly on design/layout, pre-manufacturing error detection, and production of well-structured and debugged firmware code are huge.