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The End of Electrical Engineering Design?
MuhScopeBroke:
https://techcrunch-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/techcrunch.com/2022/07/06/celus-which-uses-ai-to-automate-circuit-board-design-raises-25-6m/amp/
Curious to hear opinions. Obviously the technology isn't there yet but perhaps one day all board design will be automated :-BROKE
ejeffrey:
More and more PCB design is "dropping one or a handful of giant chips on a board and then carefully designing the PDN and thermals. More and more of circuit design is going to chip design or some form of "software" (including FPGA configuration). It's sort of the opposite of the old days when you would build a complex circuit and then drop a 7805 regulator on it for power.
Given that it's not surprising that this is more amenable to automation all the time but I don't think they are going to put board designers out of a job. Assuming it actually works (a huge assumption) it's going to let designers turn out more boards faster and therefore lower cost. Lowering cost almost always increases demand, very often more than the decreased cost.
free_electron:
meh... another fad based on clown (cloud) computing.
all the systems i have seen are banked around a bunch of pre-chewed circuits that are clicked together and the interconnects are automatically routed.
Grab a 5 volt supply , an arduino, a spi to wifi module, a serial port (db9 and max232) . Connect wifi to spi 1 , connect serial port to uart 1 , apply power to all modules. Place the blocks ( which invariable yield a huge circuit board as the parts inside the blocks are pre-placed and not modifiable and the block shape is immutable). Click route and export Gerber.
This nothing more than assembling kits based off demoboards. This is NOT board design. as for intelligence ? most 8 year olds can do better
Watch this as they show absolute crap schematics built using their 'blocks' (featherwing here, other hobby crap there) and then 'route' (it's more like somebody regurgitating a plate of squid pasta and then throwing a firecracker in it and take a picture of what stuck to the wall)
CatalinaWOW:
I don't see this as a short term threat. Doing a good board design involves juggling a great many things. Power and signal integrity. Placement of large components in three dimensions. Thermal control. And many more.
I see two approaches to doing this automatically. The first, most obvious and most difficult is to get real intelligence in the AI so that the program will get similar results to a good board designer. There has been effort in this direction for three decades that I know about, and progress has been limited at best. Not a short term threat.
The second is more like the chess programs. Just try every possible combination and evaluate the results. Eventually good enough designs will pop out. But it seems to me that the resources to do this will not be free, and it will likely turn out to be cheaper to hire a good designer. That isn't to say that the bottom quartile of designers and possibly even the bottom two won't be threatened. But no one will feel threated because we all know that no one is in those quartiles. Just ask them.
Siwastaja:
Bullshit as usual. Nothing to see here.
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