So you want to AI your PCBs? — eddie
It’s unclear how AI makes its way into the electronics and PCB world. There are a lot of players getting into the space and a lot of skeptical electrical engineers wait to see how it all plays out. This post is a brief overview of each company on my watch list. I might follow up with demos of each one later. There are a few approaches being taken, design with code 💻, chat with design 💬, and blackbox 📦. All have their flaws which is slowing adoption. These involve using code to describe schematics and in some cases board layout as well. This is a solid approach since that is the most time consuming part of electronics design (est ~40%) and the LLMs are eager to do things with code1. For the most part, you are still routing manually. Founded by Duncan Haldane in 2017, they started out with their own language built on top of Stanza but recently pivoted to a full rebuild in native Python. This was my biggest complaint when I first tried it out in 2020 so nice move with the rebuild! JITX