I've found the same thing - a little syntax example, some counter examples and generative AI does well generating syntactically correct code for PCB design.
A lot of the netlists are electrically nonsense when it's doing synthesis for me. Have you found otherwise?
I think Gemini could definitely do that microphone study. Good test case! I remember spending 8 hours on DigiKey in the bad old times, looking for an audio jack that was 0.5mm shorter.
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?
My gut agrees with you that LLMs shouldn't do this well on a specialty domain.
But I think there's also the bitter lesson to be learned here: many times people say LLMs won't do well on a task, they are often surprised either immediately or a few months later.
Overall not sure what to expect, but fine tuning experiments would be interesting regardless.
Update: Sonnet 3.5 is better than any other model for the circuit design and part finding tasks. Going to iterate a bit on the prompts to see how much I can push the new model on performance.
Figures that any article written on LLM limits is immediately out of date. I'll write an update piece to summarize new findings.
I'll note that the bandwidth doubled from PCIe 4.0 to PCIe 5.0 (it's now 30GHz).
Dealing with that speed increase is causing a whole lot of problems for all the designers in the ecosystem. It's a bit of a nightmare, but people are for sure using it (in your laptops, in the data center).
We ended up adding some specific features/strategies to the autorouter we're building for to handle those speed. It was pretty hard to get right.
Without knowing exactly what you are working on, here are a few ideas:
1. Figure out if you can do fewer slow iterations. What's driving the need for a full PCBA run for each iteration? Might be able to split out to rigid assembly and flex for example.
2. Run more experiments in parallel. If you have multiple ideas or variations to test, design them all and fabricate them all. Flex antenna? Make like 30 parametric variations.
If design then becomes the bottleneck, then automate that next.
Fascinating technology - if I interpret it correctly it looks like you're replacing lots of manual pipetting with a surface that can scooch little drops around using electrostatics. And then do a bunch of stuff you can't do with a pipette like controlling temperature, mixing.
Have you found an increase in throughput from the device vs a human with a traditional wet lab? Or is more about saving bio-chemists some serious back pain?
Good set of questions, and thanks for the feedback. Currently updating the website to add this stuff.
Comments/answers to questions in order:
1. Yes, finding a single resistor is easy. Part solving is more about making parametric circuits possible. (like a buck regulator that can configure itself on SS, output voltage). There you need to calculate values from parameters and then go find a part you can actually buy. Doing that manually is less magical of an experience.
3. Our customers are professional EEs doing really complex work (e.g. many 30Ghz SERDES), and our website is drastically out of date. Will update design on site soon - this post was some guy submitting our landing page to HN. I'm trying to keep up!
4. Yes, this works already. Was very hard to do on the product side, design code was relatively simple. DDR3 example here - https://youtu.be/bw4KxhV-d8g
5. Physical constraints are imported or generated - works quite well to automatically sync electromechanicals. Mutliple 3D models including STEP can be added to parts, again I need to update the website.
Welp - seems there are out of date parts of the website. We launched router last Tuesday so have to update that we are end to end now. Thanks for the pointer!