alt Hacker NewsMy friend is an electrical engineer. He designs circuit boards for a living. We were having dinner the other night, and when the topic of AI came up he told me rather confidently that he didn't think AI was coming for his job anytime soon.
I kind of cautiously disagreed. He told me that the applications he used had no tooling for AI.
I basically said "give it six months". I think in my googling now, it's already here.
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I largely agree with your friend. There's a big difference between it being possible, and it being adopted. A startup could come out with cutting edge AI integrated eCAD tools tomorrow, and ten years from now Apple will still be using Cadence to design the iPhone.
Basically, unless the legacy eCAD companies decide to add it themselves, there's too much pain involved in switching tools — and even with that caveat, Cadence specifically is too much of a dinosaur to integrate it effectively anyway.
That said, there's a big distinction depending on whether your friend works primarily on the schematic or layout side.
The new models that have come out can now see
People are trying, but it's not here because it's a multi-dimensional problem space where there are local optimums but often no perfect solution and 'good enough' might only be judged through practical testing, integration, or supply chain realities which are at best predictable and often emergent. You can't always foresee why a design will fail until it's 80% done and then you have to go back 20% to solve it another way. This is particularly the case with power, interface, budget, thermal, EMI, radio, optical, spatial, supply chain, firmware, HR, regulatory, deployed unit, or assembly process constrained designs. Turns out that's most non-trivial designs.
I had some success with using Claude in conjunction with my oscilloscope and spice simulations. I think it is an under explored space so far.
In case you are interested: https://lucasgerads.com/blog/lecroy-mcp-spice-demo/
I will post more updates soon.