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Are you ready for using AI for PCB design?
PCB design is a small piece of the overall product development process but demands expertise to do it well. Indeed, with AI-based place and route, engineers can benefit from hundreds of successful designs without the required time investment.
Your favorite machine learning, optimization, and generative AI algorithms may soon be used in your favorite PCB design program. Now that ChatGPT has become a household name and competitor companies are developing their own GPT equivalents (Claude, LLaMa, etc.), EDA startups are looking at how to leverage these tools to help PCB designers and engineers be more productive. With so many industries touched by automation and AI, it was only a matter of time before PCB designers would get their own tools. All the companies listed below are trying to capture the requirements at a very high-level and letting the software do the rest of the part automatically.But, today these tools are still in the experimenting & development stage but this is definitely the game changer technology in embedded system design. 1, JITX(USA) seems like not providing software as of now but helping companies automate hardware design and deliver it faster using their tools in the backend. See the JITX tool in action using a script to design a PCB. https://youtu.be/ra0SWTrLzhs 2, Celus(Germany) is reducing the complexity of designing electronics with the help of easy to use drag and drop tool to pick the required building block and then the software will automatically build the rest of the design. See a quick introduction about what they are trying to build and why. They are still running pilot projects with a focus on large companies and enterprises. https://youtu.be/r_ucfhZgRmk 3，Flux AI is a browser-based electronics design tool that helps you go from idea to PCB 10x faster. It has built-in support for modern hardware design methodologies: reusability, collaboration, and simulation. Here are some of the key features of Flux AI:
Overall, Flux AI is a powerful tool that can help you to design and develop electronics more quickly and efficiently. https://youtu.be/7v-IDY2hbLk 4，CADY is a cloud based software which is used automatic inspection and verification of electrical schematics. CADY’s system has successfully identified significant errors in over 65% of the inspected schematics.It helps reduce number of re-spins, faster time to market, and improved final product quality, reliability, and safety. CADY is user-friendly and adheres to the highest data security standards. We do not store customer NetList and/or BOM files.Enhance your design process, conserve resources, save money, and accelerate time to market while contributing to the overall quality, reliability, and safety of your end product. CADY is platform-agnostic and support all the leading CAD software: Mentor, Cadence, Altium. Zuken, Autodesk. Among the supported Netlist formats are Quick View Connections (*.qcv) and OrCAD netlist (.dat). Contact us if you require support for an additional software.The inspection run-time ranges from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the complexity of the design. https://youtu.be/fjkW2_VG1Ps 5，Circuit Tree is an Indian startup that is trying to do a similar thing but they have a GUI based online tool to input the requirements.They have another more advanced way of giving detailed custom inputs. They are taking the high-level requirement inputs and generating Schematic, PCB Design, BOM with pricing using the Octopart database automatically using their backend tool. After the design is generated, an in-house team looks at the design and gives it a final finish before delivery. It is estimated that their tools help engineers save anywhere between 70 – 90% of the circuit design effort. You can also watch a demo of their tool here: https://youtu.be/oMksK8V1DIU 6，Circuit Mind is another technology company based out of London trying to completely automate the design of electronic circuits. Their compiler takes in the requirements for a circuit board and outputs the circuit board design. They have a short introduction video on their website. It looks like they are in a very early stage of development and not yet ready to showcase what they have already built. I was not able to find more details on their website or somewhere else. I will try to contact their founders and if I get more details I will add here later. https://youtu.be/zctId7VLyjI 7， Zuken has chosen a unique three-stage approach to deploying AI-based products. Based on machine learning technologies, users can benefit from Zuken’s extensive design library or from their own design experience and best practices. https://youtu.be/NA-Y8xH7Ce8 8，InstaDeep launched DeepPCB in November 2019, Pune AI-Powered Cloud-Native PCB Routing.AI product company InstaDeep, announced the launch of its new decision-making routing platform, DeepPCB™. The fully scalable Printed Circuits Board (PCB) router is an entirely automated, no-human-in-the-loop cloud-native product. It allows the user to upload their own board and get results in less than 24 hours, accelerating customer development cycles by weeks, if not months. https://deeppcb.ai/ 9，Gumstix Geppetto (USA)have launched an online tool by name Geppetto which enables board design with ease of drag and drop of components and also shows the board in 3D so you know how your board looks before ordering. https://youtu.be/AK3A0Z9yu_k PCB design involves a multitude of tasks, ranging from circuit design to PCB layout and preparation for production. As of 2023, there is no single system that will handle all of your engineering and PCB design tasks. But the range of options available today is impressive, both in the design and manufacturing space. Post on 23-Dec-2023 |
