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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.




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.




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