[elamje]

This is an amazing concept.

You still need heavy EE understanding to know how to develop PCBs, so it’s not going to turn every software engineer into a PCB pro, but it could totally change the game for EEs that can learn to code.

This is definitely a step in the right direction though and I’m wondering how much of a PCB can be represented in an abstract syntax tree or something similar. Are there edge cases, or could you completely describe a PCB layout using code?

[mawildoer]

Definitely agree this isn't taking away EEs - anytime soon or ideally ever! The goal is to make EEs far more potent, rather than bring SWEs to hardware (although letting them easily tweak existing board's filter constants, vdivs etc... would be awesome too!)

We're honestly not sure how explicitly we want to describe a layout in code, or if it's a more declarative thing. Currently we're leaning more towards the declarative approach (eg. this trace carries 100mA of current) rather than the imperative (this trace is 0.150mm wide) since it should scale more intuitively with equations and layer better with DFM specs etc...

Have you got some ideas?

[elamje]

Treating it declaratively is what I initially thought it would be, but what happens when the user needs to tweak the layout for some unique requirement? My guess is what would happen is it would force them to completely eject from your declarative approach, similar to how if you build software on low-code tools, and need to tweak something, you typically have to completely eject. The low-code thing has no understanding to render your custom thing.

Idk maybe this can be solved, but seems problematic to describe layouts like SQL then rely on query planners to deliver the perfect execution.