It's never occurred to me to even try getting an LLM to design or layout a circuit for me.
Instead, I have dozens or hundreds of chats in my history where I debate the merits of different parts for different tasks and scenarios, the nuances of decoupling strategies (package size vs deregulation), work out resistor network ratios from the reels I have on hand.
Then being able to feed an LLM a datasheet and have it write a custom driver against the registers I need so that it does exactly what I want without the cognitive overhead of a buggy package with someone else's strong opinions about how a part should be used is amazing.
Frontier models are incredibly good at electronics, and it's got nothing to do with what happens inside the EDA.
Design, no... but I've definitely thought about letting one route traces... while autorouters work, I was hoping Claude could do matched traces better. At the time, it didn't want to generate the kicad pcbnew file though. /shrug
Everyone is different, but board layout is one area where I aggressively don't want any LLM input until such a time as it is as good at board layout as it is at refactoring code.
We're still a ways off from that, and that's likely because board layout requires a much more nuanced perspective of the enclosure shape, power requirements, heat dissipation, RF...
It's really not about placing ICs with caps nearby. I actually really enjoy that part anyhow. That's the fun part!
It's never occurred to me to even try getting an LLM to design or layout a circuit for me.
Instead, I have dozens or hundreds of chats in my history where I debate the merits of different parts for different tasks and scenarios, the nuances of decoupling strategies (package size vs deregulation), work out resistor network ratios from the reels I have on hand.
Then being able to feed an LLM a datasheet and have it write a custom driver against the registers I need so that it does exactly what I want without the cognitive overhead of a buggy package with someone else's strong opinions about how a part should be used is amazing.
Frontier models are incredibly good at electronics, and it's got nothing to do with what happens inside the EDA.