What confidence would you have in AI's ability to do 20-40GHz signal routing with good integrity? HDMI + USB4 + USB-C DP AltMode and a bunch of USB4 routing/switching fabric stuff?
Hook it up so it can experiment away by itself with tools, provide a end goal and ask it to iterate until it reached it. What the "AI can do vs not" becomes more about how long you can let it do inference in such loop, with local hardware it gets really cheap (granted you have the hardware already), with remote inference cost is probably the limiter.
> Hook it up so it can experiment away by itself with tools, provide a end goal and ask it to iterate until it reached it
Those "tools" you throw out so cavalierly cost around $50,000 to $300,000 per annual seat license with all the optional packages needed for 40GHz signals (like Cadence Allegro + Sigrity X Speed / SystemSI). Even if AI could do it it'd be much cheaper ($3-8k) to get someone in China to use their license and knowledge to do it.
But how is cost related to "AI's ability to do X"? Of course if you can't afford the required tools, or inference for that part, remote or local, then you can't do any of that stuff. The same if you don't speak/know the language the specifications/manuals/guides are done in, and you can't afford a translator, but kind of besides the point when we're trying to discuss AI's ability to do something.
For hobby stuff, I'd like to create some boards that involve a bit more than the usual MCU. Things like PCIe or USB4 or HDMI. If AI can't do those things for <$2,000 it doesn't make a difference to my life.
At some point the cost makes it irrelevant. If you drive a Bugatti Chiron, you don't care about the price of petrol. Humans or AI, there's not really a difference if the capital costs vastly outweigh the labor costs.
What's special about it, other than more constraints, more things to take into account, and having to simulate/test more - so the need for some specialized SW?
They are different constraints than the ones in SW development, but is there some fundamental difference that prevents replacing the human in the loop with AI in the loop?
Experienced humans can do basic high speed layout without expensive simulation using rules of thumb that worked for them in the past. It’ll be overconstrained and overbuilt, but it will work.
I’m curious if AI’s know enough to do some useful high frequency / data rate layouts without paying for $50,000+ simulation tools.
You can certainly make it produce a lot of design rules of thumb. You can make it do the research for each of those based on the literature. And you can then make the machine sort out the rules of thumb by effect and quantify them meaningfully.
Then you can make it process existing good designs and make it propose a general design/routing methodology (and it's own scripts/tools for calculating/optimizing the "thumb" rules that would be used throughout) for initial placement/routing of key components based on all the collected data.
Then you may have enough context and tools to have it make use of them during design.