[crote]

The problem is going to be getting those functional blocks in the first place.

The industry does not like sharing, and the openly available datasets are full of mistakes. As a junior EE you learn quite quickly to never trust third-party symbols and footprints - if you can find them at all. Even when they come directly from the manufacturer there's a decent chance they don't 100% agree with the datasheet PDF. And good luck if that datasheet is locked behind a NDA!

If we can't even get basic stuff like that done properly, I don't think we can reasonably expect manufacturers to provide ready-to-use "building blocks" any time soon. It would require the manufacturers to invest a lot of engineer-hours into manually writing those, for essentially zero gain to them. After all, the information is already available to customers via the datasheet...

[seveibar]

This is why me and even some YC backed companies are working toward datasheet-to-component ai. We don’t trust third party, but we do trust datasheets (at least, trust enough to test for a revision)

[crote]

So why would anyone designing hardware trust your third-party component library? If I don't trust it when it is handwritten by a trained (albeit probably junior) engineer, I am definitely not going to trust anything generated by AI.

Datasheets get incredibly confusing incredibly fast, and every single detail is critical. It's quite common for one datasheet to describe multiple parts at the same time, even in the same tables and diagrams, and have contradictions between the two parts. You end up with pins labeled "EN/SET" where the xxx1 variant has the pin act as Enable and the xxx3 variant have the same pin act as Setpoint. If you don't generate two separate symbols for those, the symbols are essentially useless because they can't be trusted. And that's just about the easiest thing you're going to come across.

This isn't a problem which can be solved downstream. Even trained experts are often confused because the input data is just really bad. You can't throw garbage into AI and except diamonds to come out, the only way to solve it is to convince all the manufacturers to switch to a to-be-developed universal documentation protocol.