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That's a great discussion of autorouting. Then he ends with: "key piece to enable the “vibe-building” of electronics." Ouch Routing itself is easy. It's when t

That's a great discussion of autorouting. Then he ends with: "key piece to enable the “vibe-building” of electronics." Ouch Routing itself is easy. It's when the router has to tear up stuff it already routed to fit new stuff in that things get complicated and the combinatorics start to get you. I miss the autorouter KiCAD used to have. It was taken out for iffy IP reasons (the author had worked for an autorouting company). Reaction to users who wanted it back were along the lines of "Real Men Don't Use Autorouters".[1] [1] https://forum.kicad.info/t/autorouting-and-autoplacement/18569/8 https://forum.kicad.info/t/autorouting-and-autoplacement/185...

seveibar 2y ago
Haha I feel like the right reaction to "vibe-*" is to cringe. I cringe a little bit every time I see someone promoting a vibe-coded app at the moment, but I think back to how I got started in coding (I was constantly annoying people on old ActionScript forums to fix my code) and I see so much potential in people being able to get started quickly in any domain. I hope that our autorouter (and others that follow!) will similarly allow people to ship their first electronics without needing tons of guidance or formal education. That said a good autorouter should also be useful to professionals! So hopefully we help with that as well!
bsder 2y ago
I wish these folks well and hope that their autorouter gets folded into KiCad. However, as one of the cranky old people who don't really want to see KiCad expend any energy on autorouters, PCB autorouters are a pain in the ass that never work. We can look at VLSI autorouters to determine why that is. VLSI autorouters also were a pain in the ass that never worked. But what happened was that VLSI suddenly got lots of layers and you could dedicate a layer to routing vertically, a layer to routing horizontally, a layer to routing power and still have a couple of layers for global vertical interconnect, global horizontal interconnect, and global power. The fundamental problem with PCB autorouting is that PCBs have WAY more obstructions than VLSI chips do. First, components themselves are obstructions and choke points. Second, PCB vias almost always obstruct all the layers of the board while VLSI vias only obstruct the two layers being connected. Third, PCB vias tend to be bigger than your interconnect metal width. Fourth, the number of PCB layers in use is way smaller than the number of layers in VLSI--the most common numbers of layers are 4 layers (most projects--of which only 2 are really used for general routing), 2 layers (because of cost engineering--good luck autorouting these) and 6 (a tiny minority). It all adds up to PCB autorouting being a significantly more complicated job than VLSI autorouting.
- seveibar 2y ago
  Author here. Lots of great points being made. I want to throw in a crazy prediction. I think routing is basically an image transformer problem without a good dataset right now. If the eye of the giant AI companies turned to autorouting and large synthetic but physically simulated circuit datasets were created, we would basically be done and autorouting would be a solved problem. This means that all the work I’m doing now on heuristic algorithms, as well as all the hard work done by humans, will probably not be needed in the future. I just don’t see autorouting as being more difficult (in terms of solution space size) than the art being produced by transformer models right now. I’m saying this because you’re right, these heuristic algorithms can only get us so far- the problem is really difficult. But our human intuition, the magic black box operation we do, doesn’t seem to be too far beyond the emerging transformer image models.
  - theamk 2y ago
    The major difference is in PCB, every single track has to abide by the rules, no exceptions are allowed if you want your board to work. While AI-generated art is full of small defects which people are just ignoring, who cares about non-natural shadows or unrealistically large fingers. It is possible to iteratively combine AI with DRC checker and loop until all is good, but it's not obvious to me that this would be performant enough, or if this system will stay in some sort of local minimum forever once the circuit is complex enough.
    - seveibar 2y ago
      The same way claude never outputs code that has a syntax error, the image transformers will output DRC compliant “images”! I think spatial partitioning can help solve issues with minor DRC violations as well- it should be easier to correct an image than to generate one from scratch. But I’m not even sure it’ll be necessary because of how coherent image models already are.
      - UncleEntity 2y ago
        You're suggesting the robots can learn the routing algorithms and rules just by looking at a bunch of pictures? Sure, maybe, given a super-massive amount of data. I see it as the difference between "I want a photo-realistic portrait of a beagle" and "I want a photo-realistic portrait of my neighbor's beagle, Bob". The first one there's some general rules as to what makes something a 'beagle' so is not too hard while the second has specific constraints which can't be solved without a bunch of pictures of Bob. To address the specific issue, an AI would have to learn the laws of physics (aka, "Bobness") from a bunch of pictures of, essentially, beagles in order to undertake the task at hand.

seveibar 2y ago

Haha I feel like the right reaction to "vibe-*" is to cringe. I cringe a little bit every time I see someone promoting a vibe-coded app at the moment, but I think back to how I got started in coding (I was constantly annoying people on old ActionScript forums to fix my code) and I see so much potential in people being able to get started quickly in any domain. I hope that our autorouter (and others that follow!) will similarly allow people to ship their first electronics without needing tons of guidance or formal education. That said a good autorouter should also be useful to professionals! So hopefully we help with that as well!

bsder 2y ago

I wish these folks well and hope that their autorouter gets folded into KiCad. However, as one of the cranky old people who don't really want to see KiCad expend any energy on autorouters, PCB autorouters are a pain in the ass that never work. We can look at VLSI autorouters to determine why that is. VLSI autorouters also were a pain in the ass that never worked. But what happened was that VLSI suddenly got lots of layers and you could dedicate a layer to routing vertically, a layer to routing horizontally, a layer to routing power and still have a couple of layers for global vertical interconnect, global horizontal interconnect, and global power. The fundamental problem with PCB autorouting is that PCBs have WAY more obstructions than VLSI chips do. First, components themselves are obstructions and choke points. Second, PCB vias almost always obstruct all the layers of the board while VLSI vias only obstruct the two layers being connected. Third, PCB vias tend to be bigger than your interconnect metal width. Fourth, the number of PCB layers in use is way smaller than the number of layers in VLSI--the most common numbers of layers are 4 layers (most projects--of which only 2 are really used for general routing), 2 layers (because of cost engineering--good luck autorouting these) and 6 (a tiny minority). It all adds up to PCB autorouting being a significantly more complicated job than VLSI autorouting.

seveibar 2y ago
Author here. Lots of great points being made. I want to throw in a crazy prediction. I think routing is basically an image transformer problem without a good dataset right now. If the eye of the giant AI companies turned to autorouting and large synthetic but physically simulated circuit datasets were created, we would basically be done and autorouting would be a solved problem. This means that all the work I’m doing now on heuristic algorithms, as well as all the hard work done by humans, will probably not be needed in the future. I just don’t see autorouting as being more difficult (in terms of solution space size) than the art being produced by transformer models right now. I’m saying this because you’re right, these heuristic algorithms can only get us so far- the problem is really difficult. But our human intuition, the magic black box operation we do, doesn’t seem to be too far beyond the emerging transformer image models.
- theamk 2y ago
  The major difference is in PCB, every single track has to abide by the rules, no exceptions are allowed if you want your board to work. While AI-generated art is full of small defects which people are just ignoring, who cares about non-natural shadows or unrealistically large fingers. It is possible to iteratively combine AI with DRC checker and loop until all is good, but it's not obvious to me that this would be performant enough, or if this system will stay in some sort of local minimum forever once the circuit is complex enough.
  - seveibar 2y ago
    The same way claude never outputs code that has a syntax error, the image transformers will output DRC compliant “images”! I think spatial partitioning can help solve issues with minor DRC violations as well- it should be easier to correct an image than to generate one from scratch. But I’m not even sure it’ll be necessary because of how coherent image models already are.
    - UncleEntity 2y ago
      You're suggesting the robots can learn the routing algorithms and rules just by looking at a bunch of pictures? Sure, maybe, given a super-massive amount of data. I see it as the difference between "I want a photo-realistic portrait of a beagle" and "I want a photo-realistic portrait of my neighbor's beagle, Bob". The first one there's some general rules as to what makes something a 'beagle' so is not too hard while the second has specific constraints which can't be solved without a bunch of pictures of Bob. To address the specific issue, an AI would have to learn the laws of physics (aka, "Bobness") from a bunch of pictures of, essentially, beagles in order to undertake the task at hand.