alt Hacker NewsIf you have solid domain knowledge, LLMs are a force multiplier for electronic design. You just have to have a spider sense for “this is going off the rails”.
Other than that, it does useful circuit review, part selection (or suggestions for alternative parts you didn’t know existed), and is usually usefully skeptical. It’s also great at quick back of the napkin “can I just use a smt ceramic here?” Type calculations, especially handy for roughing out timings and that kind of thing.
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im imagining if you had a couple parts picked, an llm could follow the reference designs quite well and pick relevant parts and lay them out.
maybe not in the best way, but from a post here last week or so, somebody has written an altium mcp, from which i assume a bunch of the timing and capacitor checks could be run.
maybe not anything particularly high tech, but enough to let mechanical engineers put together test boards without needing to get too far into the electrical discipline
This. LLM's are still not good enough to trust for Vibe-Circuit building - a circuit re-design is a lot more cost and time than a code change - But they can get you over so many hurdles getting you to the right references in forums and datasheets quickly, I suspect it wont be too long before they can make schematics and PCB's that are 90% there, but currently much more useful in the firmware design.
I am now more of a hobbyist than a professional and LLM's allow me to get results quicker, for example over Christmas I replaced my Pioneer stereo with a new custom motherboard, re-using the class AB analog parts and all the switches and the VFD Display. LLM helped me do it a lot quicker and gave me a couple of novel options, write up here => https://rodyne.com/?p=3380