[cjk2]

Make two separate signals arrive at exactly the same time on two 50 ohm transmission lines that start and end next to each other and go around a right hand bend. At 3.8GHz.

Edit: no VSWR constraint. Can add that later :)

Edit 2: oh or design a board for a simple 100Mohm input instrumentation amplifier which knows what a guard ring is and how badly the solder mask will screw it up :)

[DHaldane]

Right - LLMs would be a bit silly for these cases. Both overkill and underkill. Current approach for length matching is throw it off to a domain specific solver. Example test-circuit: https://x.com/DuncanHaldane/status/1803210498009342191

How exact is exactly the same time? Current solver matches to under 10fs, and I think at that level you'd have to fab it to see how close you get with fiber weave skew and all that.

Do you have a test case for a schematic design task?

[cjk2]

Yeah. But you need $200k worth of Keysight kit to test it.

The point is there’s a methodology to solve these problems already. Is this better? And can it use and apply it?

[bmicraft]

It would seem to me that the majority of boards would be a lot more forgiving. Are you saying you wouldn't be impressed if it could do only say 70% of board designs completely?

[AdamH12113]

Not the GP, but as an EE I can tell you that the majority of boards are not forgiving. One bad connection or one wrong component often means the circuit just doesn't work. One bad footprint often means the board is worthless.

On top of that, making an AI that can regurgitate simple textbook circuits and connect them together in reasonable ways is only the first step towards a much more difficult goal. More subtle problems in electronics design are all about context-dependent interactions between systems.

[nurple]

I hate that this is true. I think ML itself could be applied to the problem to help you catch mistakes in realtime, like language servers in software eng.

I have experience building boards in Altium and found it rather enjoyable; my own knowledge was often a constraint as I started out, but once I got proficient it just seemed to flow out onto the canvas.

There are some design considerations that would be awesome to farm out to genai, but I think we are far from that. Like stable-diffusion is to images, the source data for text-to-PCB would need to be well-labeled in addition to being correllated with the physical PCB features themselves.

The part where I think we lose a lot of data in pursuit of something like this, is all of the research and integration work that went on behind everything that eventually got put into the schematic and then laid out on a board. I think it would be really difficult to "diffuse" a finished PCB from an RFQ-level description.

[cjk2]

No because it’s hard enough picking up an experienced human’s designs and work with them. A 70% done board is a headache to unwrap. I’d start again.

[nurple]

This is how I am with software. There's usually a reason I'm arriving at 70% done, and it's not often because it's well designed and documented...