AI Can Now Design Circuit Boards—For Some Problems, Anyway
Can AI design circuit boards yet?
EEBench, a new benchmark from the atopile team, tests AI models on real circuit-design tasks using declarative code instead of graphical tools. Early results show Claude Opus 5 leading at 61.6%, with Grok 4.6 close behind. The benchmark grades designs through deterministic SPICE simulations, checking performance across component tolerances and cost. While AI still can't build a whole phone, it's making serious progress on specific design challenges.
So, can AI design circuit boards yet? Some of them, yes.
- corn-cheese
For reasonably complex boards, it’s often not possible to know if it’ll work as intended until you have an assembled prototype in hand… even if you have the best SPICE and RF simulations ever, data sheets for many components can be missing important details, or components can have errata.
LLMs may be able to accelerate time to first prototype, but I don’t think it’ll be possible for them to revolutionise electronics design in the same way that’s happened for software - there’s not enough data, and it’s not cheap to gather more.
- SequoiaHope
I have 15+ years of PCB design experience. Mostly hobby stuff but a fair amount of processional work. Kilowatt range brushless motor controllers, basic RF stuff, lots of microcontroller stuff.
I had fable design an LED earring. Rechargeable coin cell, RP2350 cpu, IMU, 45 addressable LEDs. It made two mistakes - missed the through holes on the coin cell holder footprint and made the center pad too small. I was able to have JLC swap the through hole battery holder for a surface mount one, and I put a little solder on the small center pad to make it stick up above the mask. They work great!
I was sufficiently impressed that I’ve been going over old circuit board designs. Some half finished, some completed but in need of a next rev, and I’m getting so much done.
To see it hit the mainstream like the OpenAI announcement, I think big things are coming for this world and by and large they are not ready for it.
For my part, I have always loved PCB design and layout but I simply can’t keep up with the amount of labor required to build what I want, so I welcome this change.
I have also begun exploring more advanced algorithms for PCB manipulation. I have a fairly dense board that needs a few more small chips added. I have an algorithm now that can kinda shuffle and jostle things around so you take up all the spare microns of space across a region of the board and make openings to squeeze a little more in there. It’s pretty cool to see the visualizations as I have it generate movies of […]
- CyLith
A personal data point: I had Claude Opus 4.8 design a fairly textbook circuit that outputs a monochrome image burned in an EEPROM over standard 640x480 VGA using only 74 series logic and GALs. It designed the circuit and GAL code, and I did the routing, and got it made through JLC for $6. After it came back, there was one error that was not caught, which I could blue-wire, and it works just fine otherwise. I was fairly impressed.
- itomato
I got a flexpcb that validates in JLC and PCBWay DRC tools from the KiCAD MCP Server and Codex.
I have yet to order any or program it, but it was enough to make me push on with a PCB art project for ST-style guitar pickguards - no netlist, no problems.
I'm also foolishly toying with NeXTBus dev boards for the Cube. Is it cursed? Probably. https://github.com/itomato/NeXTBus-Dev-Board
- iopapa
Results for GPT-6 Astra and Gemini Flash 3.8 are just in!
GPT-6 claimed the first spot with a score of 69.3.
Gemini 3.8 Flash on a very solid 5th spot with 55.4.
- andrewchambers
I think the new Astra computer use demos show that the models might be able to do things like inspection of real world objects if given a camera.
Super excited to see real world feedback added into the agent loops we have gotten used to working with. Could you
let the model print and test the circuit boards it is prototyping with a jig?
- alex7o
I have a circuit board on my bench designed and ordered from china for 1h (manufacturing+ shipping took 14days), fable designed it I think or sol don't remember anymore but it was in claude code. I told it to benchmark different kicad autoroute tools and I picked the routes I liked the best, with a bit of changes. It feels like magic to be able to go from idea toa physical thing in such a short amount of time. The board works I made some mistakes the ai had made some mistakes but mostly stuff I could fix with some soldering, also one parts datasheet was wrong but I couldn't have known that without ai.
But I started like others, I would build manually, then run drc then sleep on it and check again and ask an llm to double check for me then order. Llms catch quite a few things but like with code like to make things more complicated than that have to be.
- embedding-shape
Interesting that on their current leaderboard (https://eebench.org/), GPT-5.6 Sol scores just above GPT-5.4 but below GPT-5.5, the only benchmark that shows that 5.6 is worse than 5.5 on something?
That the table contains what seems to be absolute numbers for score, cost/task, time/task and output tokens, makes it seem like they've only made one run for each task/model combo, but that can't be right, right? I don't see any mentions of how many times they run each task, so if it's just one run per task/model, isn't this more noisy than useful?