{"id":615945,"date":"2026-09-06T04:34:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T04:34:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/615945\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T04:34:29","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T04:34:29","slug":"can-ai-now-design-pcbs-that-just-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/615945\/","title":{"rendered":"Can AI Now Design PCBs That Just Work?"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the recent release of its GPT-6 Astra model, OpenAI explicitly pushed the claim that it is capable of designing complete circuit boards in KiCad, starting from a provided schematic and outputting a fully routed PCB that theoretically could be sent off to be manufactured. This of course raises the question whether this is just a nifty party trick that works under strictly controlled conditions like most auto-routing tools, or whether there\u2019s more to it. In a recent [EEBench] blog post,<\/a> OpenAI\u2019s claims are put to the test.<\/p>\n

Back in 2024, we looked at<\/a> how LLMs handle circuit board design, starting with the schematic. The conclusion was that you might as well just do it all by hand. Tracking progress here, [EEBench<\/a>] is an electrical engineering agent benchmark that tests how effective these so-called AI agents are at performing useful hardware engineering work. As their methodology already makes clear, creating a populated and routed PCB from a schematic is just one step of many.<\/p>\n

Consequently, GPT-6 Astra scores 69.3% (+\/- 10%) on their benchmark, roughly in the same ballpark as Claude Opus 5, albeit cheaper and faster. It should be noted that [EEBench] is run by the developers behind Atopile<\/a>, which is a code-based system for creating PCBs in KiCad with a strong focus on use by such AI agents.<\/p>\n

Despite this, the blog post makes it clear that there is still a long way to go before hardware engineers can receive their pink slips and take up another profession. After all, while vibe-coding a quick prototype PCB can be a nice shortcut, for a one-off project PCB, most boards are expected to handle all the edge cases, be fully validated by multiple independent engineers, and have passed stringent testing before committing to a production run.<\/p>\n

(Top image: from OpenAI GPT-6 Astra KiCad video<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With the recent release of its GPT-6 Astra model, OpenAI explicitly pushed the claim that it is capable…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":615946,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-615945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=615945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/615945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/615946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=615945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=615945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}