seveibar

Standardization is extremely unlikely, chip manufacturers won't/haven't made a major effort here and having spoken with some, they don't want to. It is much easier and more feasible at this point to do automated visual analysis against the footprint and discovered photos from the internet

AI is exceptionally good at RP2040/RP2350/ESP32-based boards, we've ordered ~15 unique designs, mostly RP2040-based that were designed and autorouted with AI using tscircuit and usually OpenAI models.

Currently the major mistakes that AI makes: 1) Improperly rotated connectors (backwards USB port) 2) Endless routing loops for complex boards 3) Really huge/unreadable single page schematics

I'm extremely bullish on AI for PCB design, but there is a huge, huge tooling gap. We basically need to soup up all our collective design rule checks so that AI can work in corrective loops. It needs to check for things like "opamp schematic layout conventional" and "trace width closely matches reference design for chip". One thing that makes me super excited is supply-chain resiliency when chip/subcircuit-swapping becomes super easy

Many of the new agentic electronic design tools are KiCad-based, which is fine, but for people creating new EDA tools I'd encourage them to take a look at tscircuit (open-source, MIT). KiCad wasn't built for AI-gen with things like automatic routing/placement, supplier footprint orientation checking, connector orientation checking and other features that will be required as more people expect extensive validation for AI-generated designs. KiCad could add these things, but they've got decades of baggage and many Altium features to pull in. I'm worried that we're all getting bound by KiCad s-exprs

tscircuit! An open source framework for building circuits, we have a lightening fast autorouter so i spend lots of time debugging complex PCB routing problems

> To me innovation in autorouting means being able to 'have a conversation' with it: being able to easily adjust things and see the results and map out the tradeoffs would be very useful

author here: This is basically our philosophy. LLMs can churn out constraints/code very quickly to pull out the specific requirements for a design or the chips you're using. When people use tscircuit (or any electronics-as-code framework) they can talk to an LLM and just keep yelling at it in the same way you yell at an LLM to fix a web page. The success of web pages and LLMs is built from small constraint algorithms like flexbox and CSS grid, this article is just one constraint algorithm that can help LLMs approximate a solution without specifying a bunch of XY coordinates that would challenge its spatial understanding

author here: I think synthetic data, generated by ~brute force iteration with LLMs, with every DRC analysis imaginable and more, will yield a more consistent/usable/larger dataset than any existing dataset. It's a mistake to put too much weight in anyone's existing data. This is why we work hard to make algorithms that LLMs can use, because they have emerging spatial capabilities that excel when coupled with detailed analysis.

Author here. Happy to hear thoughts on this article! Our goal is to make a "realtime PCB autorouter", which means every millisecond matters!

Hello everyone, just wrote this article to hopefully save someone a year of time while building an PCB autorouter. Enjoy! Here for questions.

Despite what electrical engineers would claim, I think it's very under-studied under a modern lens. When people ask for good places to get started I usually tell them to just look at what game developers are doing for pathfinding. Autorouting sort of a form of multi-agent pathfinding, so there are a lot of relevant concepts from that area.

The tension in autorouting IMO is people generally want something ideal that passes all design rule checks. My thinking (and IMO the more modern way of thinking) is that fast algorithms, fast feedback loops and AI participation are more important.

There are also a lot of relevant algorithms in VLSI/chip design, the folks at OpenROAD seem to have good stuff although I'm not intimately familiar.