12 ms·

Can AI design circuit boards yet?

422 points by iopapa 13d ago

AdriaanvRossum 13d ago
I know a startup [1] that tries to accomplish this. [1] https://www.schematik.io/ https://www.schematik.io/
- maxdo 13d ago
  Love the democratization of access. Still curious how this is better vs gpt 6 astra or grok 4.7 in the future trained on spacex problems ?
- samuelbeek 13d ago
  Mostly focused on BOM, schematics, and firmware now but slowly expanding to circuit boards if we feel we can deliver real value there. Early experiments with Astra are promising
- iopapa 13d ago
  Love what samuel and his team are building over in the Netherlands! Always thought it would be fun if there was a more beginner friendly version of atopile [1]. [1] https:/atopile.io/
  - so-cal-schemer 11d ago
    Cool! Looks like a company that grew out of §3.3.4 of SICP. Hardware oriented NixOS and GUIX users should be very interested in this: declarative PCB designs. 3.3.4 A Simulator for Digital Circuits https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/3_002e3.xhtml#g_t3_002e3_002e4 https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/3_002e3.xhtml#g_t3_00... 3.3.5 Propagation of Constraints https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/3_002e3.xhtml#g_t3_002e3_002e5 https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/3_002e3.xhtml#g_t3_00... 2.1.4 Extended Exercise: Interval Arithmetic https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/2_002e1.xhtml#g_t2_002e1_002e4 https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/2_002e1.xhtml#g_t2_00...
sillypuddy 13d ago
Is this basically what https://www.diode.computer/ https://www.diode.computer/ is doing?
- tdeck 12d ago
  It's a bit curious that every image of the boards on their website looks like a render.
johnboiles 13d ago
Yes. I just made one with Fusion and Codex.
kestrelquant 6d ago
[flagged]
amelius 13d ago
I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs. The next pain-point is sourcing the components from Digikey, LCSC, etc., and finding suitable substitutes if necessary. Of course this assumes the LLMs can already read datasheets because that's the biggest pain-point in designing electronics. It's like filling out tax forms. Finally it would be great if LLMs could extract simulation models from datasheets!
- nickff 13d ago
  Routing is the easiest part of layout, and there have been auto-routers (which mostly worked) for a long time now; the difficult task is in placing components, and adjusting those placements.
  - amelius 13d ago
    Sure, I was just using "route" to mean also floorplanning because that's what Astra's routing tool also does. Not sure how they name it. Sorry if I was sloppy.
    - nickff 13d ago
      Not at all, but the term for routing and placing the components is ‘layout’. Floorplanning usually refers to the laying out of larger blocks of the circuit (with the blocks themselves already having been laid-out).
      - amelius 13d ago
        Yes but I'm not so concerned with how people name these steps.
- thesz 13d ago
  > I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko Eurisko was used for VLSI chip design, then used rules discovered there to design TCS Traveler winning fleet. It is unbelievable how artificial intelligence walk in circles.
dubbie99 13d ago
I have found that AI is great for sorting out your libraries, drawing and helping double check footprints managing your BOM. I still draw my schematics and layout my boards. I haven’t found it any good for those tasks yet. There are too many stupid errors it makes. I do get it to review my work though and often it catches things I have missed.
rpcope1 13d ago
Just as some anecdatum, I've tried this a couple of times over the last few years. 2024-2025, no body could generate anything of any sort of complexity, however maybe around the Opus 4.7 timeline, I tried having it generate some relatively simple and one slightly more complex circuit around 8-bit PIC micros, and was very pleasantly surprised. The schematics for simpler stuff is usually OK, often with some of the kind of crazy belt-and-suspenders stuff you see in code (how many decoupling caps do I actually need here, Claude?), and PCB layout has basically been terrible every time I've tried it. Recent models can generate mostly competent schematics if you're using well known parts, feed them data sheets (and you _must_ feed them the errata too) and it's not too complex. Any complexity analog or RF, everything falls down quickly if you know what you're looking at. Maybe Astra will do better? There's still so much implicit knowledge that a good designer (not me by a long shot, but I know a little) will bake into a board, and even as cheap as JCLPCB is now, you don't want to have to spin a half dozen revs because Claude or Codex hallucinated. It will be genuinely interesting to see what happens on this front.
- latentsea 13d ago
  I never thought about it until now, but as someone with zero skill in this domain I feel interested in making my own vibetronics now.
- napowderly 13d ago
  [dead]
cmiles8 13d ago
Have tried this a few times. While AI has been helpful in talking through component choices and other topics, it’s consistently been a spectacular fail each time in actually designing the board. I’ve had similar results asking AI to design 3D models for 3D printing. “Coach me on optimizing error on my printer”… helps. “Build me a print ready file to these specs.”… it’s like a drunk cat attacked my computer. Just confidently puts out total nonsense.
- sitzkrieg 13d ago
  LLMs like to fail spectacularly at real life measurement and not tell you about it as well
andrewchambers 13d ago
I think the new Astra computer use demos show that the models might be able to do things like inspection of real world objects if given a camera. Super excited to see real world feedback added into the agent loops we have gotten used to working with. Could you let the model print and test the circuit boards it is prototyping with a jig?
- david_rugaex 13d ago
  In July I was struggling with writing DIY Rust firmware for an e-ink screen. I mistakenly thought I'd ordered an Inkplate 6 ED060SC7 and actually had the later version, which confounded my efforts. I was also mistaken about the pixel resolution. The way I found this out is I propped it up next to a webcam so it was more or less full frame, and I had the (then new) Fable write a python script to bezier warp the camera capture to a flat projection of the screen. At that point I couldn't address the whole screen. Once I'd guided the capture script I just left the LLM overnight with the instruction to get full control confirmed by a capture round trip, and it was meaningfully finished in a couple of hours. I don't really have the skills to attempt that myself in a reasonable time frame.
- exe34 13d ago
  I don't know about pcbs but i gave chat gpt a picture of my window to help design a mesh screen frame to hold the feline hostage in, and it gave a fairly convincing impression of understanding what was going on, although at one point it thought the window swung inwards (it's an outie).
dennis16384 13d ago
If you give it a real solver to drive and business constraints to operate under, it will do pretty good job (which is to map your business rules to constraints and balanced costs, develop deterministic tests, probabilistic tests, acceptance gates, all boring stuff).
- iopapa 13d ago
  Really excited about constraint solvers making a comeback! Especially after seeing Z3 getting a mention in anthropics fermat post. EEbench is using atopile's internal constraint solver for engineering parameters (think operating temperature, voltage ranges, stacked tolerances etc).
boznz 13d ago
I have tried to use AI on this from GPT3, documenting a few of the attempts on my blog. They know the datasheets and the theory enough to be extremely useful at the start, but the most recent ones are becoming scary good. Routing a PCB is certainly a bit more than joining some wires, you have to accommodate power traces, ground loops, component overlap and all the various RF tricks and tips, but I do believe we are less than a year from prompt to full assembly including enclosure.
itomato 13d ago
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 https://github.com/itomato/NeXTBus-Dev-Board
- KingFelix 13d ago
  Sweet, do you have the pickguard project live somewhere? I want to check it out!
  - itomato 13d ago
    npm run art https://github.com/wjkennedy/stratopcb/tree/main https://github.com/wjkennedy/stratopcb/tree/main
- noman-land 13d ago
  How do I subsribe to learn the result of this test. I'm very keen to try this.
- thearn4 13d ago
  I've gone through this same workflow and had success all the way through DRC ruleset passing with JLCPCB-based settings, ordering, fab, and use. Board was ordered with PCBA (they did assembly of the stock components) and I did SMD for just the oddball module/ICs they don't stock. Works exactly to design. My boards are for hobby use and are ridiculously simple though compared to anything professional (breakout boards for specific components in FPV drone video transmission subsystems). That's probably an important detail. I think its like anything else in AI right now. It can do it 90% of the time but that 10% can be really rough and if its a task you can't do or verify yourself, you won't know the difference.
- luma 13d ago
  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.
goosethe 13d ago
the answer is a resounding yes: https://github.com/seanwevans/pynq_butterfly https://github.com/seanwevans/pynq_butterfly
- throwaway219450 13d ago
  For stuff like this, definitely. It’s already exciting. Claude et al are surprisingly competent with real hardware. I’ve also had good success debugging basic issues with micros - not via the debugger, but giving datasheet and written analysis. I’m sure it could do things like capture from a connected oscilloscope (Salaeae have an MCP integration for their logic tools). Also for SPICE which I never bother with because the tools always felt stuck in the 90s, but having some serious automated analog review would be nice. I’m really excited to play with peripherals like the RP2040 or Beaglebone real time logic blocks, or improving/adding real USB support instead of USB serial. For circuits I would trust a netlist or DRC/ERC review, checking a design against reference circuit values, probably not placement as that tends to be guided straight from a datasheet where it makes a difference and I like the artistic side of it.
- cozzyd 13d ago
  that's FPGA firmware isn't it?
CyLith 13d ago
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 fairly impressed.
- brcmthrowaway 12d ago
  Does JLC handle sourcing of components too?
  - jetbalsa 12d ago
    They do, https://jlcpcb.com/parts https://jlcpcb.com/parts
    - brcmthrowaway 12d ago
      What if I need .. just one?
      - dsvf 12d ago
        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 count and low cost. So if you always go for the latest and greatest ICs as advertised by TI, instead of the Chinese jellybean clone, you'll add up hidden fees quickly. However, when I choose components, I start out on their basic parts page and only go for a non-basic part if it's not there and I really need it.
        rjh29 11d ago
Anil0809 13d ago
Yes — this is already possible to a useful degree. I’ve been using tscircuit, where you can describe circuits in code and use AI agents to generate and iterate on schematics and PCB layouts. I’ve seen designs from this workflow go all the way to fabricated, working hardware.
krupan 13d ago
I'm confused. Who made this benchmark and why? It is fascinating to me that people are putting this much work into trying to measure and evaluate LLMs when we've never gone to this level for humans. Sounds like they also built a harness/feedback loop so the LLM knows if it's doing a good job? Again, why didn't anyone ever do this for human engineers?
- bbmatryoshka 13d ago
  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)
  - krupan 13d ago
    Are you saying LLMs are reproducible? I seem to get at least a slightly different answer every time I ask the same question
    - bbmatryoshka 12d ago
      two istances of the same model, with low temperature, are infinitely more similar than any couple of human minds
- codekansas 13d ago
  Humans learn differently from LLMs. LLMs already contain most of the information they need to be able to do PCB layout from reading the entire internet, but they need this kind of fast feedback loop to learn how to extract and use that information in the right way. Humans learn to act at the same time they learn knowledge.
- lexicality 13d ago
  > I'm confused. Who made this benchmark and why? It's a thinly veiled advert for Atopile. I don't know if it's a company behind it or just someone with a lot of money to spend on advertising since their about page (and docs) both 404, and the "packages" link sends you to a login screen that tries to unlock 1password. I guess claude can make circuit boards but not functioning websites?
ChrisMarshallNY 13d ago
Interesting. AI may be pretty good at managing the gazillion different things that make up circuit boards. Frankly, I am surprised that it isn't already a solved problem, as we've had silicon compilers, for many years, and I always figured that IC design is more difficult than PCB.
- napowderly 13d ago
  I think the amount of reuse is a big difference. IC tools build on characterized cells with a lot of the rules already encoded. With PCBs, even when you're reusing a reference circuit, you're often manually carrying over the constraints and figuring out which layout decisions mattered. A lot of the engineering gets repeated rather than traveling with the design. That's something we're trying to improve with atopile.
- hdhdbdbdxk 13d ago
  Digital silicon design is fairly simple in principle. It's hard because there are billions of transistors to route PCB design on the other hand more often then not has outside constrains like mechanical, thermal an RF design
CamperBob2 13d ago
Works very well with EAGLE XML files, especially if you give it the EAGLE.DTD schema that CadSoft provides. Both .sch and .brd files can be extensively manipulated by Claude (and likely everybody else at this point.)
PennRobotics 13d ago
At the very least, you can (and probably should) put a plaintext netlist and BOM into an LLM to triple-check your work. It will use the part datasheets and decent EE logic to cross reference pins and parts and polarities and generally check that SMD caps and resistors have realistic specifications for their footprint, switching regulators and communication ICs are configured correctly (e.g. when you have resistor settings for an ethernet PHY indicating 100Base-T and RMII, you also won't need TX/RX 2 and 3 and two clocks and a COL net, which it would check), all nets are named and linked correctly, buses have the correct and consistent termination, and so on. It's game over once AI figures out autorouting.
deleted 13d ago
[deleted]
mohan_bee 13d ago
[dead]
mschuster91 13d ago
The submission reeks of LLM tells (especially the "UI" just looks straight like the usual Claude slop). Anyway... the posed question reminds me of an anecdote I cannot find because Google is contaminated to hell and beyond, some researchers a decade ago let a machine-learning algorithm loose on an FPGA, and it "found" a design that worked but made no sense, because it exploited unique physical features of this specific chip.
- Legend2440 13d ago
  Sounds like you're talking about the FPGA evolution experiments Adrian Thompson and others did in the 1990s: https://evolvablehardware.org/history.html https://evolvablehardware.org/history.html
  - mschuster91 13d ago
    Indeed! With the keyword "evolving circuitry" I was able to find the blog post [1], with only one submission 8 years ago that barely got traction [2]. Thanks! [1] https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099226
alex7o 13d ago
I have a circuit board on my bench designed and ordered from china for 1h (manufacturing+ shipping took 14days), fable designed it I think or sol don't remember anymore but it was in claude code. I told it to benchmark different kicad autoroute tools and I picked the routes I liked the best, with a bit of changes. It feels like magic to be able to go from idea toa physical thing in such a short amount of time. The board works I made some mistakes the ai had made some mistakes but mostly stuff I could fix with some soldering, also one parts datasheet was wrong but I couldn't have known that without ai. But I started like others, I would build manually, then run drc then sleep on it and check again and ask an llm to double check for me then order. Llms catch quite a few things but like with code like to make things more complicated than that have to be.
saejox 13d ago
Someone will create a self replicating robot factory soon. All robots designed by robots. Likely a crazy youtuber first
- vessenes 13d ago
  It’s already running in Hawthorne, CA
embedding-shape 13d ago
Interesting that on their current leaderboard (https://eebench.org/ https://eebench.org/), GPT-5.6 Sol scores just above GPT-5.4 but below GPT-5.5, the only benchmark that shows that 5.6 is worse than 5.5 on something? That the table contains what seems to be absolute numbers for score, cost/task, time/task and output tokens, makes it seem like they've only made one run for each task/model combo, but that can't be right, right? I don't see any mentions of how many times they run each task, so if it's just one run per task/model, isn't this more noisy than useful?
- laybak 13d ago
  yeah noticed the same. I wonder if this will be a recurring theme for model releases: each release specializes on a set of headline benchmarks, along with regression in benchmarks that are less of a priority
- chmod775 13d ago
  If you look at the score distribution, Grok and Opus 5 especially stand out for doing consistently well and rarely ever scoring under 50%. Basically they always at give you something that at least works. Most others, especially and famously Fable 5.1, seem to have a fair chance of completely failing, despite also sometimes excelling.
- iopapa 13d ago
  We run each model multiple times against each challenge and take the average score. We include the variance below the score in the leaderboard. GPT 5.5: 42.3±10.1 GPT 5.6 sol: 39.4±8.7 We were also surprised by the low sol score but it seems consistent with our experience in using it in the field in atopile as agent in our harness. In general OpenAI models didn't do too well on electronics, which seems to change now with GPT-6 Astra. Results are in soon!
MarcScott 13d ago
Not exactly in the the same class as PCBs, but I've had a lot of success with Codex and Claude producing Fritzing diagrams. I've even got a skill set up with Claude so that it follows my preferences with breadboard wiring, using bezier curves to avoid wires crossing. Also, if it can't find a component in the library, it's quite happy drawing svgs of its own.
Scene_Cast2 13d ago
I found LLMs circa 4 months ago to be decent at textbook-style electronics, but they choke at anything nontrivial. They approach things like someone that knows the undergrad and grad textbooks, but has absolutely zero experience. No ability to answer questions such as "is this adequate", "do I need a LPF here", "how do I kill resonance without increasing impedance", etc. I'm guessing that this is due to a lack of RL and data.
- matherial 13d ago
  Old textbooks. They love 741 op-amps, etc.
  - laughing_man 12d ago
    There is always a better choice than a 741 for new designs, but somehow people still use those things too.
- jacquesm 12d ago
  That pig can hardly dance...
joshka 13d ago
Would be good to see the full details of the tasks / methodology used. https://eebench.org/methodology.html https://eebench.org/methodology.html makes this unclear. > A real capacitor makes the task more interesting. A ceramic part may provide much less than its advertised capacitance once it has voltage across it. Parts have tolerances. Adding more capacitance costs more, takes up space and makes the rail slower to recharge when the power returns. A design that works with nominal values can fail with the parts that arrive. It sounds like from a reasonable reading of the benchmark post that there's some things that are being tested that are assumed to be criteria that you expect the models to intuitively find those things to be important (i.e. the stuff about working on parts that have tolerances etc.). If that's so, then this really feels like mostly an exploration of whether an LLM has a good understanding of unstated constraints and has an appropriate in distribution set of priors that would be able to form models where it's reasonable to design on those lines. It's hard to tell whether this is a problem though as the methodology is imprecise. If you're spending time on evals against your own product, I'd be super curious to see how far you can get to by using a top tier model to produce generalized instructions for lower tier models. E.g. in a loop: "This eval missed X. what's the simplest single instruction that would have helped this session consider that as necessary that can benefit all future runs. Stick that in AGENTS.md and retest."
compumike 13d ago
Not PCB layout, but I've been building CircuitLab Assistant (https://www.circuitlab.com/ https://www.circuitlab.com/), a chat window 100% integrated with our schematic editor and simulation engine. Can build / modify a schematic, troubleshoot, answer questions, configure simulations, etc. If anyone wants to try an early beta, reply with your CircuitLab username and I'll get you set up. We know have a lot more to do, but would love some feedback on this early version!
illwrks 13d ago
I've been tinkering with a personal project over the past year. I have no experience and I'm slowly failing forward with the help of YouTube, KiCad and patience. I've had three rounds of PCB's from an online supplier, only to discover issues related to my own understanding of the components in each version. In my latest iteration I've been leaning on some standard models (Gemini and Claude) and they have inspected my schematics and spotted some errors and instructed me on how to address them, as well as advised on how to make use of some components I wasn't aware I needed. What I will say... they didn't design anything, I've done that myself, but they have been a good tool to bounce ideas off of. Time will tell if I will get something usable this time around!
- baby_souffle 12d ago
  > I've done that myself, but they have been a good tool to bounce ideas off of. Ask ChatGPT/Claude to give you an expert EE/PCB subagent/personality. Do this a few times and massage the results into one of your liking. Load this into your harness with mcp to your eda and then ask for two sub agents: one to thoroughly review the schematic, design, component choices ... etc and the other to be an adversary with the explicit goal of explaining why the current design won't work. You'll learn a lot about your design from that :).
  - illwrks 12d ago
    In a way I'm doing that already, just in a more manual way. I like the idea of setting up the dual personalities though, I'll give it a go ;)
oxqbldpxo 13d ago
It is 3 years later and these AIs have not produced anything meaningful.
- deleted 13d ago
  [deleted]
- rgoulter 12d ago
  For one, there are frequently examples posted to HN where LLM coding agents have been used to help people complete projects which otherwise wouldn't have been done. You're taking a really strict view of 'meaningful' if you think LLM coding agents are incapable of writing code. For another, the case mentioned in this post is quite specific. It's more useful to ask "ok, so they can't design circuit boards; what can AI do?"
WarmWash 13d ago
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.
joshka 13d ago
Astra seems generally available now in codex at least - got any updates on this?
BlackRabbit1 13d ago
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.
- edg5000 12d ago
  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)
  - BlackRabbit1 12d ago
    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.
    - edg5000 12d ago
      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.
      - BlackRabbit1 12d ago
        Codex/Claude is much much much too expensive in relation to their limitations. I stick to cheaper latest generation models on Openrouter (or EU-hosted providers when it comes to IP-protected stuff from work).
conorcleary 12d ago
It's going to tell us that boards are inefficient and to start different
iopapa 12d ago
Results for GPT-6 Astra and Gemini Flash 3.8 are just in! GPT-6 claimed the first spot with a score of 69.3. Gemini 3.8 Flash on a very solid 5th spot with 55.4.
- fractorial 12d ago
  Sir, I think you are lost.
- coder543 12d ago
  Please run GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.3-Flash. I would love to see how they do. On the smaller end of things, Qwen3.8-27B and Ling-3.0-Flash would also be interesting. In the benchmark, have you considered instructing the models to build their own SPICE simulations to test their work? Simply asking them to write and run simulations could improve performance, even without telling them what to simulate.
winrid 12d ago
You need to have the AI validate it with a separate reviewer like with code.
baby_souffle 12d ago
Yes. Certainly not a "one-shot" type deal but I've been pretty impressed with LLMs for helping tweak layout and to do thermal/power simulations as well as BOM consolidation. They're excellent at "can I swap X and Y pins on the micro? If yes, update the docs/firmware/schematic and import the changes to the PCB" type things. Routing is still a challenge but making _adjustments_ to a layout for better routing in a particular area is decent. The last time I had a model take a datasheet and make a footprint and 3d model out of it, GPT 5.4 had just been released and the results were decent but did need tweaking.
throwatdem12311 12d ago
I was watching “GPT Plays Pokemon” for a few minutes yesterday. It can beat the game in 18 hours. Faster than most players. Using only vision. It got me thinking. It could master all sorts of things like this but I wouldn’t care. I’m numb to it at this point. But if could get an Inbachi-All clear in DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou, using only vision. Then I might start paying attention. https://youtu.be/1Rm38aT9Jmo https://youtu.be/1Rm38aT9Jmo
ccpc 12d ago
I'm finishing my bachelor's degree in radio electronics and instrument engineering. I've been using AI models to help me understand various concepts, but I want to say that, for now, they aren't ready for serious development.
- edg5000 12d ago
  What makes you think that? They're great at reading datasheets and creating schematics in my experience. Layout I've been doing myself though, with the AI evaluating. I'll eventually delegate that as well. For schematics I use Skidl and some custom binding generators.
tdeck 12d ago
> When its 5 V supply disappears, the circuit has to keep the processor alive for another 20 ms so it can save the accumulated reading. > Most models intuitively jump to the right base conclusion: add a capacitor. This is written as if it's some astonishing expert knowledge and not something that would be obvious to any hobbyist who knew the names of basic components.
extralongdivisi 12d ago
Very limited study. A lot of datasheets are inaccessible without signing an NDA. Even if you're a VC-backed enterprise, some unnamed chip vendors will tell you to pound sand if you're less than 8 figures of annual revenue. Worse, many recommendations in datasheets were written in the 80s, overkill for many applications, or completely wrong and won't be updated until an errata is published 6 months later. Given current workflows, I don't see how AI would help designing a PCB with an alpha chip that's doing anything remotely novel. More to the articles point, AI designing ASICs or other Verilog/HDL defined components could be very interesting use case
- edg5000 12d ago
  What kind of chips are you talking about? I guess most ARM SoCs and maybe RAM/ROM ICs?
  - extralongdivisi 10d ago
    My most recent experiences have been those chips, yes. Re: my point about doing novel things.
- lefra 12d ago
  > A lot of datasheets are inaccessible without signing an NDA Only for very high-end stuff, where just designing the board around the chip needs a team of engineers.
  - extralongdivisi 10d ago
    Not necessarily true, most recently I was working with an USB 3.1 chip that anyone can buy off DigiKey, but I had to call contacts at 4 seperate companies just to get firmware to make superspeed work. We werr just too small of a fish to make the chip vender care. This is becoming more true as a larger percentage of hardware infrastructure is occupied by the datacenter economy.
paidx 12d ago
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childintime 12d ago
A really nice application could be making test jigs, to validate everything on the PCB is functioning properly. One could have it design a fully custom motherboard with pogo pins and the necessary software, etc. All should be low complexity and therefore doable by the AI without much supervision.
SequoiaHope 12d ago
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 have JLC swap the through hole battery holder for a surface mount one, and I put a little solder on the small center pad to make it stick up above the mask. They work great! It took 6 days of Fable usage, so about $50 on my Max plan. Very cheap for hardware dev. I was sufficiently impressed that I’ve been going over old circuit board designs. Some half finished, some completed but in need of a next rev, and I’m getting so much done. To see it hit the mainstream like the OpenAI announcement, I think big things are coming for this world and by and large they are not ready for it. For my part, I have always loved PCB design and layout but I simply can’t keep up with the amount of labor required to build what I want, so I welcome this change. I have also begun exploring more advanced algorithms for PCB manipulation. I have a fairly dense board that needs a few more small chips added. I have an algorithm now that can kinda shuffle and jostle things around so you take up all the spare microns of space across a region of the board and make openings to squeeze a little more in there. It’s pretty cool to see the visualizations as I have it generate movies of the component drift. I foresee much more powerful tools like this in the future. One tip: have it make a project web page with a chronological list of big changes and detailed visualizations for everything that happens. I can actually prompt all of this on my phone while I am out and about, and view the results on a Tailscale served local page. I’ve always wanted to be able to do PCB design when away from home and now I can!
- a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
  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?
  - SequoiaHope 12d ago
    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.
EtienneDeLyon 12d ago
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jing09928 12d ago
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corn-cheese 12d ago
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.
- a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
  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.
  - merlincorey 12d ago
    The skill floor has gone down dramatically, but the skill ceiling is still quite high depending on the domain.
    - a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
      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 https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta The full transcript is here: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/8a0d1add3c637b858a9a181e98c40e https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/8a0d1add3c637b858a9a181e98c40e...
- petra 12d ago
  I think we'll may see something like: 1.AI design tool And in the warehouse of a big electronics distributor: 1.something like 3D printing that can make a single board rapidly 2.An automated assembly for a single board 3.AI based Automated testing for prototypes, with remote access. This may reduce the loop to under a day.
msuniverse2026 12d ago
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"?
- beering 11d ago
  Depending on what you’re doing, there are circuit simulators that can verify your work. You can have the LLM drive the simulation but of course then you have to trust that it’s setting up and interpreting the simulation correctly.
- a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
  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.
- CamperBob2 12d ago
  Send it to another frontier-level model.
- lefra 12d ago
  Any company doing consultancy in electronics. You're going to have to pay for the time an electronics engineer spend on understanding what you want to do and reviewing your design, plus the consultancy's margin.
igor47 12d ago
I worked on this product, which is available free for personal use: https://www.jitx.com/ https://www.jitx.com/ I recommend the CLI, which I wrote specially to enable an easy LLM workflow: https://docs.jitx.com/en/latest/getting-started/cli/index.html https://docs.jitx.com/en/latest/getting-started/cli/index.ht... There's a companion Claude skill: https://github.com/JITx-Inc/jitx-skills https://github.com/JITx-Inc/jitx-skills I would bet that using this, you could get pretty close to shippable PCB on first try. This is being used by some pretty big players to design complicated high frequency boards, and that's the main focus of the product, but it can handle basic designs just fine.
NotThereYet 12d ago
No because text models can’t spatially design and image models can’t spell
edg5000 12d ago
Three things that worked well for Sol and also Fable: - Designing circuits in Skidl - Checking my layout work (not doing it) - Operating my lab equipment (running my scope, lab PSU, lab load, programmer/debugger any any other interface.
librasteve 12d ago
I fancy making a custom ARM or RISC-V chip design, is AI any good for that?
dackdel 12d ago
im using this project called konnect to do what the post title says and it works well enough. going to only get better i assume.
iamflimflam1 12d ago
I did this recently - https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/03/twelve-dev-boards-from-one 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 https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/12/vibing-hardware
holoduke 12d ago
As 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.
chadcmulligan 12d ago
> 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.
- utopiah 12d ago
  Everything that can be objectively tested and has already tools to do so in place will work better in an automated process, regardless of the underlying technology. PCB design with circuit simulation fits that bill perfectly.
aidio 12d ago
Two years ago, AI could give you circuit design suggestions, but now AI has already begun to actually "do circuit design"
lu7897859 12d ago
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hn_submit 12d ago
I do believe PCB routing is something that could be performed successfully by A.I. but new designs from scratch? Only if it was in the training material.
ccbakla 12d ago
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deleted 12d ago
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dibyaprakash 12d ago
Yes, you can try out pcbeditor.com
jeanmichelselli 12d ago
LLMs are amazing at this sort of things and they represent a very useful tool.. but only if you know what you're doing. In any case, it's great to see that these models can help with electronic circuits too, I'll give it a try. We're living in very interesting times!
ibobev 12d ago
What about Kona? https://logicalintelligence.com/kona-ebms-energy-based-models https://logicalintelligence.com/kona-ebms-energy-based-model...
aaron695 12d ago
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Unified-Mentor 12d ago
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Ldorigo 12d ago
What I would love is an ai that can reverse engineer a circuit board from close up pictures. Unfortunately all the models are lagging behind in visual understanding, especially for this kind of specialized work
- YZF 12d ago
  Most circuit boards have many layers that aren't visible in pictures so I'm not sure what you're asking for is generally 100% doable. That said you can guess a lot by the components and what's visible. I'll bet you that if you added a layer that recognizes the components, their position, orientation and visible connection and emits that as a JSON or some machine readable format the frontier models would be really good at telling you what's going on and even potentially filling in the blanks.
alexsherrick 12d ago
I've been making a wireless earbud with a ton of features over the last year. It's taken a lot of time but I'm about to send it to fab. AI can make PCBs but it is very time consuming for complex designs.
karmicthreat 12d ago
I had better luck recently. I’ve tried most of the commercial systems. None of them really got very far into the design. Recently Radu over at Galvano.ai let me beta his platform. Way farther and way faster than anything I have used so far. Even managed to make the schematic placement sane. The actual project was a regen clamp. So if the output voltage is greater than the input voltage (back emf from motor) you divert the excess to a resistor. This has some analog tuning needed. So I created a python and skidl mirror of the netlist. This mirror was used to create ngspice unit tests to drive component optimization. Turns out not every resistor needed to be .1% and the ESR of our storage caps was a critical value. All in all, it’s like ai and software. It’s not going to replace every job but will change how the jobs are done.
peter_d_sherman 12d ago
>"We are obviously still some distance from asking an AI to build an entire phone in one prompt." What a great idea for a new AI benchmark! We already have general knowledge benchmarks, instruction following benchmarks, "Humanity's Last Exam", and several software engineering benchmarks. Why not create a new AI hardware engineering benchmark where some of the questions could be around building an entire smartphone, and one of those questions (which will obviously fail at this point in time, but perhaps not in the future) would be to: create an entire smartphone in a single prompt. ? We could subsequently diagnose a given LLM (or other AI's) hardware engineering abilities by diagnosing when, where, why and how it failed, when asked to create an entire smartphone! Which could help train better models, at least in terms of hardware engineering capabilities... (Also, side note: For a hardware engineering company, asking a job candidate the rather open-ended question of "tell me how you would design a smartphone?" would be a great open-ended interview question, leading to many other subsequent hardware questions / explorations of other areas of related knowledge potentially relevant to the candidate's assessment...)
tshrove 12d ago
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luciana1u 12d ago
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dboreham 12d ago
I can add to the list of "other things" LLMs can do: I've been having Claude design a building for me. It writes code that it feeds to OpenSCAD for rendering.
NishanStepak 12d ago
There was an earlier article in Live Science which was also in Popular Science where AI designed computer chips which a human being might not make. I am assuming this might happen eventually with circuit boards and other electronics as well. Artificial Intelligence is not like us, it does things differently and might come up with some different designs than we would think of. https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/humans-cannot-really-understand-them-weird-ai-designed-chip-is-unlike-any-other-made-by-humans-and-performs-much-better https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/humans-cann...
robosynx 12d ago
It's already doing
bizrod 11d ago
This week I had Opus 5 review pdf schematics of a (human-designed) PCB that wasn't working right, and it found the root of both problems I was seeing. Makes me think that adversarial design/review would work well. And somebody having an agent look at this schematic before they made boards would've saved me a lot of time.
junaidshaukat 11d ago
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cobychapple 11d ago
Yes? Anyone else tried out https://quilter.ai https://quilter.ai (physics-driven AI PCB layout tool)?
tehologist 11d ago
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?
omid-io 11d ago
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rjh29 11d ago
I'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.
- tdeck 11d ago
  At a certain point, it must be cheaper to just hire someone remotely to route the PCB than to burn through Claude credits on it.
ecesena 11d ago
I did 2 pcbs recently with claude (opus 4.8 and 5). One was simple, the other pretty complex. I’ll open source them at some point. I did manual routing myself, including most positioning, but claude was super helpful in identifying components, reviewing, etc. It was truly a collaboration. These are my first pcbs ever, I don’t have any edu at all at making pcbs and was really excited to receive working prototypes. The other pretty amazing thing is that I have py scripts that generate the all the kicad files, as a human I wou look d have never done that (for the cost of building the py files) but I find it pretty neat.
Sergekad0 11d ago
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seobotaicom 10d ago
Where does AI struggle the most with PCB design right now — routing, physical constraints, or making the right trade-offs?

422 points by iopapa 13d ago

AdriaanvRossum 13d ago

I know a startup [1] that tries to accomplish this. [1] https://www.schematik.io/ https://www.schematik.io/

maxdo 13d ago
Love the democratization of access. Still curious how this is better vs gpt 6 astra or grok 4.7 in the future trained on spacex problems ?
samuelbeek 13d ago
Mostly focused on BOM, schematics, and firmware now but slowly expanding to circuit boards if we feel we can deliver real value there. Early experiments with Astra are promising
iopapa 13d ago
Love what samuel and his team are building over in the Netherlands! Always thought it would be fun if there was a more beginner friendly version of atopile [1]. [1] https:/atopile.io/
- so-cal-schemer 11d ago
  Cool! Looks like a company that grew out of §3.3.4 of SICP. Hardware oriented NixOS and GUIX users should be very interested in this: declarative PCB designs. 3.3.4 A Simulator for Digital Circuits https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/3_002e3.xhtml#g_t3_002e3_002e4 https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/3_002e3.xhtml#g_t3_00... 3.3.5 Propagation of Constraints https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/3_002e3.xhtml#g_t3_002e3_002e5 https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/3_002e3.xhtml#g_t3_00... 2.1.4 Extended Exercise: Interval Arithmetic https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/2_002e1.xhtml#g_t2_002e1_002e4 https://sarabander.github.io/sicp/html/2_002e1.xhtml#g_t2_00...

sillypuddy 13d ago

Is this basically what https://www.diode.computer/ https://www.diode.computer/ is doing?

tdeck 12d ago
It's a bit curious that every image of the boards on their website looks like a render.

johnboiles 13d ago

Yes. I just made one with Fusion and Codex.

kestrelquant 6d ago

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amelius 13d ago

I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs. The next pain-point is sourcing the components from Digikey, LCSC, etc., and finding suitable substitutes if necessary. Of course this assumes the LLMs can already read datasheets because that's the biggest pain-point in designing electronics. It's like filling out tax forms. Finally it would be great if LLMs could extract simulation models from datasheets!

nickff 13d ago
Routing is the easiest part of layout, and there have been auto-routers (which mostly worked) for a long time now; the difficult task is in placing components, and adjusting those placements.
- amelius 13d ago
  Sure, I was just using "route" to mean also floorplanning because that's what Astra's routing tool also does. Not sure how they name it. Sorry if I was sloppy.
  - nickff 13d ago
    Not at all, but the term for routing and placing the components is ‘layout’. Floorplanning usually refers to the laying out of larger blocks of the circuit (with the blocks themselves already having been laid-out).
    - amelius 13d ago
      Yes but I'm not so concerned with how people name these steps.
thesz 13d ago
> I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurisko Eurisko was used for VLSI chip design, then used rules discovered there to design TCS Traveler winning fleet. It is unbelievable how artificial intelligence walk in circles.

dubbie99 13d ago

I have found that AI is great for sorting out your libraries, drawing and helping double check footprints managing your BOM. I still draw my schematics and layout my boards. I haven’t found it any good for those tasks yet. There are too many stupid errors it makes. I do get it to review my work though and often it catches things I have missed.

rpcope1 13d ago

Just as some anecdatum, I've tried this a couple of times over the last few years. 2024-2025, no body could generate anything of any sort of complexity, however maybe around the Opus 4.7 timeline, I tried having it generate some relatively simple and one slightly more complex circuit around 8-bit PIC micros, and was very pleasantly surprised. The schematics for simpler stuff is usually OK, often with some of the kind of crazy belt-and-suspenders stuff you see in code (how many decoupling caps do I actually need here, Claude?), and PCB layout has basically been terrible every time I've tried it. Recent models can generate mostly competent schematics if you're using well known parts, feed them data sheets (and you _must_ feed them the errata too) and it's not too complex. Any complexity analog or RF, everything falls down quickly if you know what you're looking at. Maybe Astra will do better? There's still so much implicit knowledge that a good designer (not me by a long shot, but I know a little) will bake into a board, and even as cheap as JCLPCB is now, you don't want to have to spin a half dozen revs because Claude or Codex hallucinated. It will be genuinely interesting to see what happens on this front.

latentsea 13d ago
I never thought about it until now, but as someone with zero skill in this domain I feel interested in making my own vibetronics now.
napowderly 13d ago
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cmiles8 13d ago

Have tried this a few times. While AI has been helpful in talking through component choices and other topics, it’s consistently been a spectacular fail each time in actually designing the board. I’ve had similar results asking AI to design 3D models for 3D printing. “Coach me on optimizing error on my printer”… helps. “Build me a print ready file to these specs.”… it’s like a drunk cat attacked my computer. Just confidently puts out total nonsense.

sitzkrieg 13d ago
LLMs like to fail spectacularly at real life measurement and not tell you about it as well

andrewchambers 13d ago

I think the new Astra computer use demos show that the models might be able to do things like inspection of real world objects if given a camera. Super excited to see real world feedback added into the agent loops we have gotten used to working with. Could you let the model print and test the circuit boards it is prototyping with a jig?

david_rugaex 13d ago
In July I was struggling with writing DIY Rust firmware for an e-ink screen. I mistakenly thought I'd ordered an Inkplate 6 ED060SC7 and actually had the later version, which confounded my efforts. I was also mistaken about the pixel resolution. The way I found this out is I propped it up next to a webcam so it was more or less full frame, and I had the (then new) Fable write a python script to bezier warp the camera capture to a flat projection of the screen. At that point I couldn't address the whole screen. Once I'd guided the capture script I just left the LLM overnight with the instruction to get full control confirmed by a capture round trip, and it was meaningfully finished in a couple of hours. I don't really have the skills to attempt that myself in a reasonable time frame.
exe34 13d ago
I don't know about pcbs but i gave chat gpt a picture of my window to help design a mesh screen frame to hold the feline hostage in, and it gave a fairly convincing impression of understanding what was going on, although at one point it thought the window swung inwards (it's an outie).

dennis16384 13d ago

If you give it a real solver to drive and business constraints to operate under, it will do pretty good job (which is to map your business rules to constraints and balanced costs, develop deterministic tests, probabilistic tests, acceptance gates, all boring stuff).

iopapa 13d ago
Really excited about constraint solvers making a comeback! Especially after seeing Z3 getting a mention in anthropics fermat post. EEbench is using atopile's internal constraint solver for engineering parameters (think operating temperature, voltage ranges, stacked tolerances etc).

boznz 13d ago

I have tried to use AI on this from GPT3, documenting a few of the attempts on my blog. They know the datasheets and the theory enough to be extremely useful at the start, but the most recent ones are becoming scary good. Routing a PCB is certainly a bit more than joining some wires, you have to accommodate power traces, ground loops, component overlap and all the various RF tricks and tips, but I do believe we are less than a year from prompt to full assembly including enclosure.

itomato 13d ago

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 https://github.com/itomato/NeXTBus-Dev-Board

KingFelix 13d ago
Sweet, do you have the pickguard project live somewhere? I want to check it out!
- itomato 13d ago
  npm run art https://github.com/wjkennedy/stratopcb/tree/main https://github.com/wjkennedy/stratopcb/tree/main
noman-land 13d ago
How do I subsribe to learn the result of this test. I'm very keen to try this.
thearn4 13d ago
I've gone through this same workflow and had success all the way through DRC ruleset passing with JLCPCB-based settings, ordering, fab, and use. Board was ordered with PCBA (they did assembly of the stock components) and I did SMD for just the oddball module/ICs they don't stock. Works exactly to design. My boards are for hobby use and are ridiculously simple though compared to anything professional (breakout boards for specific components in FPV drone video transmission subsystems). That's probably an important detail. I think its like anything else in AI right now. It can do it 90% of the time but that 10% can be really rough and if its a task you can't do or verify yourself, you won't know the difference.
luma 13d ago
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.

goosethe 13d ago

the answer is a resounding yes: https://github.com/seanwevans/pynq_butterfly https://github.com/seanwevans/pynq_butterfly

throwaway219450 13d ago
For stuff like this, definitely. It’s already exciting. Claude et al are surprisingly competent with real hardware. I’ve also had good success debugging basic issues with micros - not via the debugger, but giving datasheet and written analysis. I’m sure it could do things like capture from a connected oscilloscope (Salaeae have an MCP integration for their logic tools). Also for SPICE which I never bother with because the tools always felt stuck in the 90s, but having some serious automated analog review would be nice. I’m really excited to play with peripherals like the RP2040 or Beaglebone real time logic blocks, or improving/adding real USB support instead of USB serial. For circuits I would trust a netlist or DRC/ERC review, checking a design against reference circuit values, probably not placement as that tends to be guided straight from a datasheet where it makes a difference and I like the artistic side of it.
cozzyd 13d ago
that's FPGA firmware isn't it?

CyLith 13d ago

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 fairly impressed.

brcmthrowaway 12d ago
Does JLC handle sourcing of components too?
- jetbalsa 12d ago
  They do, https://jlcpcb.com/parts https://jlcpcb.com/parts
  - brcmthrowaway 12d ago
    What if I need .. just one?
    - dsvf 12d ago
      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 count and low cost. So if you always go for the latest and greatest ICs as advertised by TI, instead of the Chinese jellybean clone, you'll add up hidden fees quickly. However, when I choose components, I start out on their basic parts page and only go for a non-basic part if it's not there and I really need it.
      - rjh29 11d ago

Anil0809 13d ago

Yes — this is already possible to a useful degree. I’ve been using tscircuit, where you can describe circuits in code and use AI agents to generate and iterate on schematics and PCB layouts. I’ve seen designs from this workflow go all the way to fabricated, working hardware.

krupan 13d ago

I'm confused. Who made this benchmark and why? It is fascinating to me that people are putting this much work into trying to measure and evaluate LLMs when we've never gone to this level for humans. Sounds like they also built a harness/feedback loop so the LLM knows if it's doing a good job? Again, why didn't anyone ever do this for human engineers?

bbmatryoshka 13d ago
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)
- krupan 13d ago
  Are you saying LLMs are reproducible? I seem to get at least a slightly different answer every time I ask the same question
  - bbmatryoshka 12d ago
    two istances of the same model, with low temperature, are infinitely more similar than any couple of human minds
codekansas 13d ago
Humans learn differently from LLMs. LLMs already contain most of the information they need to be able to do PCB layout from reading the entire internet, but they need this kind of fast feedback loop to learn how to extract and use that information in the right way. Humans learn to act at the same time they learn knowledge.
lexicality 13d ago
> I'm confused. Who made this benchmark and why? It's a thinly veiled advert for Atopile. I don't know if it's a company behind it or just someone with a lot of money to spend on advertising since their about page (and docs) both 404, and the "packages" link sends you to a login screen that tries to unlock 1password. I guess claude can make circuit boards but not functioning websites?

ChrisMarshallNY 13d ago

Interesting. AI may be pretty good at managing the gazillion different things that make up circuit boards. Frankly, I am surprised that it isn't already a solved problem, as we've had silicon compilers, for many years, and I always figured that IC design is more difficult than PCB.

napowderly 13d ago
I think the amount of reuse is a big difference. IC tools build on characterized cells with a lot of the rules already encoded. With PCBs, even when you're reusing a reference circuit, you're often manually carrying over the constraints and figuring out which layout decisions mattered. A lot of the engineering gets repeated rather than traveling with the design. That's something we're trying to improve with atopile.
hdhdbdbdxk 13d ago
Digital silicon design is fairly simple in principle. It's hard because there are billions of transistors to route PCB design on the other hand more often then not has outside constrains like mechanical, thermal an RF design

CamperBob2 13d ago

Works very well with EAGLE XML files, especially if you give it the EAGLE.DTD schema that CadSoft provides. Both .sch and .brd files can be extensively manipulated by Claude (and likely everybody else at this point.)

PennRobotics 13d ago

At the very least, you can (and probably should) put a plaintext netlist and BOM into an LLM to triple-check your work. It will use the part datasheets and decent EE logic to cross reference pins and parts and polarities and generally check that SMD caps and resistors have realistic specifications for their footprint, switching regulators and communication ICs are configured correctly (e.g. when you have resistor settings for an ethernet PHY indicating 100Base-T and RMII, you also won't need TX/RX 2 and 3 and two clocks and a COL net, which it would check), all nets are named and linked correctly, buses have the correct and consistent termination, and so on. It's game over once AI figures out autorouting.

deleted 13d ago

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mohan_bee 13d ago

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mschuster91 13d ago

The submission reeks of LLM tells (especially the "UI" just looks straight like the usual Claude slop). Anyway... the posed question reminds me of an anecdote I cannot find because Google is contaminated to hell and beyond, some researchers a decade ago let a machine-learning algorithm loose on an FPGA, and it "found" a design that worked but made no sense, because it exploited unique physical features of this specific chip.

Legend2440 13d ago
Sounds like you're talking about the FPGA evolution experiments Adrian Thompson and others did in the 1990s: https://evolvablehardware.org/history.html https://evolvablehardware.org/history.html
- mschuster91 13d ago
  Indeed! With the keyword "evolving circuitry" I was able to find the blog post [1], with only one submission 8 years ago that barely got traction [2]. Thanks! [1] https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18099226

alex7o 13d ago

I have a circuit board on my bench designed and ordered from china for 1h (manufacturing+ shipping took 14days), fable designed it I think or sol don't remember anymore but it was in claude code. I told it to benchmark different kicad autoroute tools and I picked the routes I liked the best, with a bit of changes. It feels like magic to be able to go from idea toa physical thing in such a short amount of time. The board works I made some mistakes the ai had made some mistakes but mostly stuff I could fix with some soldering, also one parts datasheet was wrong but I couldn't have known that without ai. But I started like others, I would build manually, then run drc then sleep on it and check again and ask an llm to double check for me then order. Llms catch quite a few things but like with code like to make things more complicated than that have to be.

saejox 13d ago

Someone will create a self replicating robot factory soon. All robots designed by robots. Likely a crazy youtuber first

vessenes 13d ago
It’s already running in Hawthorne, CA

embedding-shape 13d ago

Interesting that on their current leaderboard (https://eebench.org/ https://eebench.org/), GPT-5.6 Sol scores just above GPT-5.4 but below GPT-5.5, the only benchmark that shows that 5.6 is worse than 5.5 on something? That the table contains what seems to be absolute numbers for score, cost/task, time/task and output tokens, makes it seem like they've only made one run for each task/model combo, but that can't be right, right? I don't see any mentions of how many times they run each task, so if it's just one run per task/model, isn't this more noisy than useful?

laybak 13d ago
yeah noticed the same. I wonder if this will be a recurring theme for model releases: each release specializes on a set of headline benchmarks, along with regression in benchmarks that are less of a priority
chmod775 13d ago
If you look at the score distribution, Grok and Opus 5 especially stand out for doing consistently well and rarely ever scoring under 50%. Basically they always at give you something that at least works. Most others, especially and famously Fable 5.1, seem to have a fair chance of completely failing, despite also sometimes excelling.
iopapa 13d ago
We run each model multiple times against each challenge and take the average score. We include the variance below the score in the leaderboard. GPT 5.5: 42.3±10.1 GPT 5.6 sol: 39.4±8.7 We were also surprised by the low sol score but it seems consistent with our experience in using it in the field in atopile as agent in our harness. In general OpenAI models didn't do too well on electronics, which seems to change now with GPT-6 Astra. Results are in soon!

MarcScott 13d ago

Not exactly in the the same class as PCBs, but I've had a lot of success with Codex and Claude producing Fritzing diagrams. I've even got a skill set up with Claude so that it follows my preferences with breadboard wiring, using bezier curves to avoid wires crossing. Also, if it can't find a component in the library, it's quite happy drawing svgs of its own.

Scene_Cast2 13d ago

I found LLMs circa 4 months ago to be decent at textbook-style electronics, but they choke at anything nontrivial. They approach things like someone that knows the undergrad and grad textbooks, but has absolutely zero experience. No ability to answer questions such as "is this adequate", "do I need a LPF here", "how do I kill resonance without increasing impedance", etc. I'm guessing that this is due to a lack of RL and data.

matherial 13d ago
Old textbooks. They love 741 op-amps, etc.
- laughing_man 12d ago
  There is always a better choice than a 741 for new designs, but somehow people still use those things too.
jacquesm 12d ago
That pig can hardly dance...

joshka 13d ago

Would be good to see the full details of the tasks / methodology used. https://eebench.org/methodology.html https://eebench.org/methodology.html makes this unclear. > A real capacitor makes the task more interesting. A ceramic part may provide much less than its advertised capacitance once it has voltage across it. Parts have tolerances. Adding more capacitance costs more, takes up space and makes the rail slower to recharge when the power returns. A design that works with nominal values can fail with the parts that arrive. It sounds like from a reasonable reading of the benchmark post that there's some things that are being tested that are assumed to be criteria that you expect the models to intuitively find those things to be important (i.e. the stuff about working on parts that have tolerances etc.). If that's so, then this really feels like mostly an exploration of whether an LLM has a good understanding of unstated constraints and has an appropriate in distribution set of priors that would be able to form models where it's reasonable to design on those lines. It's hard to tell whether this is a problem though as the methodology is imprecise. If you're spending time on evals against your own product, I'd be super curious to see how far you can get to by using a top tier model to produce generalized instructions for lower tier models. E.g. in a loop: "This eval missed X. what's the simplest single instruction that would have helped this session consider that as necessary that can benefit all future runs. Stick that in AGENTS.md and retest."

compumike 13d ago

Not PCB layout, but I've been building CircuitLab Assistant (https://www.circuitlab.com/ https://www.circuitlab.com/), a chat window 100% integrated with our schematic editor and simulation engine. Can build / modify a schematic, troubleshoot, answer questions, configure simulations, etc. If anyone wants to try an early beta, reply with your CircuitLab username and I'll get you set up. We know have a lot more to do, but would love some feedback on this early version!

illwrks 13d ago

I've been tinkering with a personal project over the past year. I have no experience and I'm slowly failing forward with the help of YouTube, KiCad and patience. I've had three rounds of PCB's from an online supplier, only to discover issues related to my own understanding of the components in each version. In my latest iteration I've been leaning on some standard models (Gemini and Claude) and they have inspected my schematics and spotted some errors and instructed me on how to address them, as well as advised on how to make use of some components I wasn't aware I needed. What I will say... they didn't design anything, I've done that myself, but they have been a good tool to bounce ideas off of. Time will tell if I will get something usable this time around!

baby_souffle 12d ago
> I've done that myself, but they have been a good tool to bounce ideas off of. Ask ChatGPT/Claude to give you an expert EE/PCB subagent/personality. Do this a few times and massage the results into one of your liking. Load this into your harness with mcp to your eda and then ask for two sub agents: one to thoroughly review the schematic, design, component choices ... etc and the other to be an adversary with the explicit goal of explaining why the current design won't work. You'll learn a lot about your design from that :).
- illwrks 12d ago
  In a way I'm doing that already, just in a more manual way. I like the idea of setting up the dual personalities though, I'll give it a go ;)

oxqbldpxo 13d ago

It is 3 years later and these AIs have not produced anything meaningful.

deleted 13d ago
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rgoulter 12d ago
For one, there are frequently examples posted to HN where LLM coding agents have been used to help people complete projects which otherwise wouldn't have been done. You're taking a really strict view of 'meaningful' if you think LLM coding agents are incapable of writing code. For another, the case mentioned in this post is quite specific. It's more useful to ask "ok, so they can't design circuit boards; what can AI do?"

WarmWash 13d ago

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.

joshka 13d ago

Astra seems generally available now in codex at least - got any updates on this?

BlackRabbit1 13d ago

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.

edg5000 12d ago
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)
- BlackRabbit1 12d ago
  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.
  - edg5000 12d ago
    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.
    - BlackRabbit1 12d ago
      Codex/Claude is much much much too expensive in relation to their limitations. I stick to cheaper latest generation models on Openrouter (or EU-hosted providers when it comes to IP-protected stuff from work).

conorcleary 12d ago

It's going to tell us that boards are inefficient and to start different

iopapa 12d ago

Results for GPT-6 Astra and Gemini Flash 3.8 are just in! GPT-6 claimed the first spot with a score of 69.3. Gemini 3.8 Flash on a very solid 5th spot with 55.4.

fractorial 12d ago
Sir, I think you are lost.
coder543 12d ago
Please run GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.3-Flash. I would love to see how they do. On the smaller end of things, Qwen3.8-27B and Ling-3.0-Flash would also be interesting. In the benchmark, have you considered instructing the models to build their own SPICE simulations to test their work? Simply asking them to write and run simulations could improve performance, even without telling them what to simulate.

winrid 12d ago

You need to have the AI validate it with a separate reviewer like with code.

baby_souffle 12d ago

Yes. Certainly not a "one-shot" type deal but I've been pretty impressed with LLMs for helping tweak layout and to do thermal/power simulations as well as BOM consolidation. They're excellent at "can I swap X and Y pins on the micro? If yes, update the docs/firmware/schematic and import the changes to the PCB" type things. Routing is still a challenge but making _adjustments_ to a layout for better routing in a particular area is decent. The last time I had a model take a datasheet and make a footprint and 3d model out of it, GPT 5.4 had just been released and the results were decent but did need tweaking.

throwatdem12311 12d ago

I was watching “GPT Plays Pokemon” for a few minutes yesterday. It can beat the game in 18 hours. Faster than most players. Using only vision. It got me thinking. It could master all sorts of things like this but I wouldn’t care. I’m numb to it at this point. But if could get an Inbachi-All clear in DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou, using only vision. Then I might start paying attention. https://youtu.be/1Rm38aT9Jmo https://youtu.be/1Rm38aT9Jmo

ccpc 12d ago

I'm finishing my bachelor's degree in radio electronics and instrument engineering. I've been using AI models to help me understand various concepts, but I want to say that, for now, they aren't ready for serious development.

edg5000 12d ago
What makes you think that? They're great at reading datasheets and creating schematics in my experience. Layout I've been doing myself though, with the AI evaluating. I'll eventually delegate that as well. For schematics I use Skidl and some custom binding generators.

tdeck 12d ago

> When its 5 V supply disappears, the circuit has to keep the processor alive for another 20 ms so it can save the accumulated reading. > Most models intuitively jump to the right base conclusion: add a capacitor. This is written as if it's some astonishing expert knowledge and not something that would be obvious to any hobbyist who knew the names of basic components.

extralongdivisi 12d ago

Very limited study. A lot of datasheets are inaccessible without signing an NDA. Even if you're a VC-backed enterprise, some unnamed chip vendors will tell you to pound sand if you're less than 8 figures of annual revenue. Worse, many recommendations in datasheets were written in the 80s, overkill for many applications, or completely wrong and won't be updated until an errata is published 6 months later. Given current workflows, I don't see how AI would help designing a PCB with an alpha chip that's doing anything remotely novel. More to the articles point, AI designing ASICs or other Verilog/HDL defined components could be very interesting use case

edg5000 12d ago
What kind of chips are you talking about? I guess most ARM SoCs and maybe RAM/ROM ICs?
- extralongdivisi 10d ago
  My most recent experiences have been those chips, yes. Re: my point about doing novel things.
lefra 12d ago
> A lot of datasheets are inaccessible without signing an NDA Only for very high-end stuff, where just designing the board around the chip needs a team of engineers.
- extralongdivisi 10d ago
  Not necessarily true, most recently I was working with an USB 3.1 chip that anyone can buy off DigiKey, but I had to call contacts at 4 seperate companies just to get firmware to make superspeed work. We werr just too small of a fish to make the chip vender care. This is becoming more true as a larger percentage of hardware infrastructure is occupied by the datacenter economy.

paidx 12d ago

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childintime 12d ago

A really nice application could be making test jigs, to validate everything on the PCB is functioning properly. One could have it design a fully custom motherboard with pogo pins and the necessary software, etc. All should be low complexity and therefore doable by the AI without much supervision.

SequoiaHope 12d ago

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 have JLC swap the through hole battery holder for a surface mount one, and I put a little solder on the small center pad to make it stick up above the mask. They work great! It took 6 days of Fable usage, so about $50 on my Max plan. Very cheap for hardware dev. I was sufficiently impressed that I’ve been going over old circuit board designs. Some half finished, some completed but in need of a next rev, and I’m getting so much done. To see it hit the mainstream like the OpenAI announcement, I think big things are coming for this world and by and large they are not ready for it. For my part, I have always loved PCB design and layout but I simply can’t keep up with the amount of labor required to build what I want, so I welcome this change. I have also begun exploring more advanced algorithms for PCB manipulation. I have a fairly dense board that needs a few more small chips added. I have an algorithm now that can kinda shuffle and jostle things around so you take up all the spare microns of space across a region of the board and make openings to squeeze a little more in there. It’s pretty cool to see the visualizations as I have it generate movies of the component drift. I foresee much more powerful tools like this in the future. One tip: have it make a project web page with a chronological list of big changes and detailed visualizations for everything that happens. I can actually prompt all of this on my phone while I am out and about, and view the results on a Tailscale served local page. I’ve always wanted to be able to do PCB design when away from home and now I can!

a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
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?
- SequoiaHope 12d ago
  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.

EtienneDeLyon 12d ago

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jing09928 12d ago

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corn-cheese 12d ago

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.

a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
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.
- merlincorey 12d ago
  The skill floor has gone down dramatically, but the skill ceiling is still quite high depending on the domain.
  - a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
    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 https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta The full transcript is here: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/8a0d1add3c637b858a9a181e98c40e https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/8a0d1add3c637b858a9a181e98c40e...
petra 12d ago
I think we'll may see something like: 1.AI design tool And in the warehouse of a big electronics distributor: 1.something like 3D printing that can make a single board rapidly 2.An automated assembly for a single board 3.AI based Automated testing for prototypes, with remote access. This may reduce the loop to under a day.

msuniverse2026 12d ago

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"?

beering 11d ago
Depending on what you’re doing, there are circuit simulators that can verify your work. You can have the LLM drive the simulation but of course then you have to trust that it’s setting up and interpreting the simulation correctly.
a2ff6eeb0 12d ago
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.
CamperBob2 12d ago
Send it to another frontier-level model.
lefra 12d ago
Any company doing consultancy in electronics. You're going to have to pay for the time an electronics engineer spend on understanding what you want to do and reviewing your design, plus the consultancy's margin.

igor47 12d ago

I worked on this product, which is available free for personal use: https://www.jitx.com/ https://www.jitx.com/ I recommend the CLI, which I wrote specially to enable an easy LLM workflow: https://docs.jitx.com/en/latest/getting-started/cli/index.html https://docs.jitx.com/en/latest/getting-started/cli/index.ht... There's a companion Claude skill: https://github.com/JITx-Inc/jitx-skills https://github.com/JITx-Inc/jitx-skills I would bet that using this, you could get pretty close to shippable PCB on first try. This is being used by some pretty big players to design complicated high frequency boards, and that's the main focus of the product, but it can handle basic designs just fine.

NotThereYet 12d ago

No because text models can’t spatially design and image models can’t spell

edg5000 12d ago

Three things that worked well for Sol and also Fable: - Designing circuits in Skidl - Checking my layout work (not doing it) - Operating my lab equipment (running my scope, lab PSU, lab load, programmer/debugger any any other interface.

librasteve 12d ago

I fancy making a custom ARM or RISC-V chip design, is AI any good for that?

dackdel 12d ago

im using this project called konnect to do what the post title says and it works well enough. going to only get better i assume.

iamflimflam1 12d ago

I did this recently - https://www.atomic14.com/2026/08/03/twelve-dev-boards-from-one 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 https://www.atomic14.com/2025/07/12/vibing-hardware

holoduke 12d ago

As 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.

chadcmulligan 12d ago

> 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.

utopiah 12d ago
Everything that can be objectively tested and has already tools to do so in place will work better in an automated process, regardless of the underlying technology. PCB design with circuit simulation fits that bill perfectly.

aidio 12d ago

Two years ago, AI could give you circuit design suggestions, but now AI has already begun to actually "do circuit design"

lu7897859 12d ago

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hn_submit 12d ago

I do believe PCB routing is something that could be performed successfully by A.I. but new designs from scratch? Only if it was in the training material.

ccbakla 12d ago

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deleted 12d ago

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dibyaprakash 12d ago

Yes, you can try out pcbeditor.com

jeanmichelselli 12d ago

LLMs are amazing at this sort of things and they represent a very useful tool.. but only if you know what you're doing. In any case, it's great to see that these models can help with electronic circuits too, I'll give it a try. We're living in very interesting times!

ibobev 12d ago

What about Kona? https://logicalintelligence.com/kona-ebms-energy-based-models https://logicalintelligence.com/kona-ebms-energy-based-model...

aaron695 12d ago

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Unified-Mentor 12d ago

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Ldorigo 12d ago

What I would love is an ai that can reverse engineer a circuit board from close up pictures. Unfortunately all the models are lagging behind in visual understanding, especially for this kind of specialized work

YZF 12d ago
Most circuit boards have many layers that aren't visible in pictures so I'm not sure what you're asking for is generally 100% doable. That said you can guess a lot by the components and what's visible. I'll bet you that if you added a layer that recognizes the components, their position, orientation and visible connection and emits that as a JSON or some machine readable format the frontier models would be really good at telling you what's going on and even potentially filling in the blanks.

alexsherrick 12d ago

I've been making a wireless earbud with a ton of features over the last year. It's taken a lot of time but I'm about to send it to fab. AI can make PCBs but it is very time consuming for complex designs.

karmicthreat 12d ago

I had better luck recently. I’ve tried most of the commercial systems. None of them really got very far into the design. Recently Radu over at Galvano.ai let me beta his platform. Way farther and way faster than anything I have used so far. Even managed to make the schematic placement sane. The actual project was a regen clamp. So if the output voltage is greater than the input voltage (back emf from motor) you divert the excess to a resistor. This has some analog tuning needed. So I created a python and skidl mirror of the netlist. This mirror was used to create ngspice unit tests to drive component optimization. Turns out not every resistor needed to be .1% and the ESR of our storage caps was a critical value. All in all, it’s like ai and software. It’s not going to replace every job but will change how the jobs are done.

peter_d_sherman 12d ago

>"We are obviously still some distance from asking an AI to build an entire phone in one prompt." What a great idea for a new AI benchmark! We already have general knowledge benchmarks, instruction following benchmarks, "Humanity's Last Exam", and several software engineering benchmarks. Why not create a new AI hardware engineering benchmark where some of the questions could be around building an entire smartphone, and one of those questions (which will obviously fail at this point in time, but perhaps not in the future) would be to: create an entire smartphone in a single prompt. ? We could subsequently diagnose a given LLM (or other AI's) hardware engineering abilities by diagnosing when, where, why and how it failed, when asked to create an entire smartphone! Which could help train better models, at least in terms of hardware engineering capabilities... (Also, side note: For a hardware engineering company, asking a job candidate the rather open-ended question of "tell me how you would design a smartphone?" would be a great open-ended interview question, leading to many other subsequent hardware questions / explorations of other areas of related knowledge potentially relevant to the candidate's assessment...)

tshrove 12d ago

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luciana1u 12d ago

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dboreham 12d ago

I can add to the list of "other things" LLMs can do: I've been having Claude design a building for me. It writes code that it feeds to OpenSCAD for rendering.

NishanStepak 12d ago

There was an earlier article in Live Science which was also in Popular Science where AI designed computer chips which a human being might not make. I am assuming this might happen eventually with circuit boards and other electronics as well. Artificial Intelligence is not like us, it does things differently and might come up with some different designs than we would think of. https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/humans-cannot-really-understand-them-weird-ai-designed-chip-is-unlike-any-other-made-by-humans-and-performs-much-better https://www.livescience.com/technology/computing/humans-cann...

robosynx 12d ago

It's already doing

bizrod 11d ago

This week I had Opus 5 review pdf schematics of a (human-designed) PCB that wasn't working right, and it found the root of both problems I was seeing. Makes me think that adversarial design/review would work well. And somebody having an agent look at this schematic before they made boards would've saved me a lot of time.

junaidshaukat 11d ago

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cobychapple 11d ago

Yes? Anyone else tried out https://quilter.ai https://quilter.ai (physics-driven AI PCB layout tool)?

tehologist 11d ago

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?

omid-io 11d ago

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rjh29 11d ago

I'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.

tdeck 11d ago
At a certain point, it must be cheaper to just hire someone remotely to route the PCB than to burn through Claude credits on it.

ecesena 11d ago

I did 2 pcbs recently with claude (opus 4.8 and 5). One was simple, the other pretty complex. I’ll open source them at some point. I did manual routing myself, including most positioning, but claude was super helpful in identifying components, reviewing, etc. It was truly a collaboration. These are my first pcbs ever, I don’t have any edu at all at making pcbs and was really excited to receive working prototypes. The other pretty amazing thing is that I have py scripts that generate the all the kicad files, as a human I wou look d have never done that (for the cost of building the py files) but I find it pretty neat.

Sergekad0 11d ago

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seobotaicom 10d ago

Where does AI struggle the most with PCB design right now — routing, physical constraints, or making the right trade-offs?