6 ms·

> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. Interesting that within an IC this is ba

by pjc50 5mo ago

> There are some AI-driven autorouters out there now. Placement is probably the big issue that needs to be solved now. Interesting that within an IC this is basically "solved", or at least properly automated with classical numeric techniques such as simulated annealing. I would have thought there's a big opportunity in a mixed-technique approach, where you use AI to extract unstructured data from datasheets and then feed it into more deterministic tools. I also note that it's very easy to waste more than $100 in electronics once you start actually manufacturing bad PCBs.

doubled112 5mo ago
> mixed-technique approach I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions. Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.
- NateEag 5mo ago
  I recently saw a Claude skill that used Claude, with no tools, as a spell checker. I wanted to hurl my laptop out to the window.
  - kangalioo 5mo ago
    What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved?
    - ceejayoz 5mo ago
      I am skeptical that AI brings any benefit to spell checking at all.
    - trollbridge 5mo ago
      AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.
      - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
        Spellchecking is absolutely not a solved problem. I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. I don't know how effective LLMs are, but it's difficult to imagine they can be worse than the existing regime, which is embarrassingly bad for the decades it's been around.
        PaulHoule 5mo ago
        Human copy editors are less than perfect too. I hired one copy editor who I could not trust to be the last person who touched a document before it went out. I had a friend who wrote an article for the New York Times: the article made a lot of sense before she submitted it, but it was edited for length and style and it definitely read like a New York Times piece but didn't completely make sense.
        quuxplusone 5mo ago
        An interesting idea I saw long ago in some book (I thought it was K&P's "Software Tools," or my second guess was K&R1, but neither of those panned out — a strong Mandela effect) was the clever idea of a whole-document spellchecker that works purely probabilistically, by histograms: you feed it a document, it tallies the trigraphs, and any trigraph that appears only rarely is flagged as a likely typo. This approach lets through unknown-but-realistic words like "antithematory" while flagging unrealistic words like "prisencolinensinainciusol" (because of its unlikely "ciu" and "ius" clusters) and "antthemaory" (because of "ntt" and "aor"). To make this approach work better, feed it a bunch of English text (or whatever language your document is in) before the document you really want to "spellcheck." Essentially this isn't a spell "checker" so much as a spell "linter" — it looks for antipatterns statistically associated with bugs, and reports the patterns for further investigation. If anyone knows where this trigraph-based "spellchecker" was first presented, I'd love to find out again.
    - saynay 5mo ago
      AI certainly is the shiny new hammer, and it is tempting to see the world as nails. Traditional methods might not be perfect, but they also easily fit in the memory of even low power devices. Perhaps it isn't a problem worth burning a dollar of tokens for every spelling mistake.
    - sarchertech 5mo ago
      The fact that it produces correctly spelled words says nothing about it’s ability to find spelling mistakes or to correct them without errors like completely changing the word.
      - allears 5mo ago
        You mean errors like misusing "it's" when the right word is "its?"
    - Hizonner 5mo ago
      > What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? Don't do a stupid thing like that in the first place. > In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. I doubt it, but if that's true, run a normal spell checker, and then give the output to your LLM to filter. > what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, About a billionfold improvement in compute efficiency, and a lower error rate. > and how can it be achieved? 10 seconds of actual thought.
    - jlarocco 5mo ago
      >What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? You just don't need AI to do spell checking. It's a waste of energy, bandwidth and tokens. It's like Java Enterprise Fizz-Buzz - 1000x more complicated than it needs to be and complete overkill. But at least you can tell your manager you're using AI!
  - gedy 5mo ago
    I swear that so many AI usecases I see are: "I did not have the skill or realize that you can write a program for this obvious logic". I guess that works if you aren't a programmer or don't want to hire somebody, but then wtf would I pay for your service or product?
  - mattkrause 5mo ago
    Isn't this pretty much why language models were invented? Pasting something directly into the chat interface seems weird, but if you could somehow just see where P(token | context) falls off a cliff, that's a pretty good hint that your writing has problem.
    - lambda 5mo ago
      Yeah, but for this use case you don't need Claude. You probably want a tuned lightweight small model that can run locally. Even Haiku is massive overkill for this use case.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago
        I've done it to check transcriptions of handwritten 19th century Quebec French. Is there a dedicated spell checker for that?
  - julianlam 5mo ago
    This type of laziness isn't novel. Check out left pad or the two dozen other "utility" packages that could be done in a single line of code.
- ahartmetz 5mo ago
  Something something bitter lesson blah blah I think the bitter lesson is severely misapplied in the current situation: If progress from "just add more resources" is very slow, and a huge amount of money is at stake, continous work on hand-engineering can give a continuous and very valuable competitive advantage. The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs, and I am reasonably sure that it's not going to happen like that.
  - irthomasthomas 5mo ago
    > The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs I don't know if this is still the case. Labs like anthropic and openai are spending a huge amount of their time on custom model wrappers. Something which they used to leave to their customers.
- ajross 5mo ago
  > nobody [wants to use AI] to augment already working solutions Plenty of people do, but that only produces a blog post that will get you to the front page of HN. If you want VCs to drop $40M on your head, you need to pretend to reinvent the world. Then, to further appease the rain gods, you need to sue the bloggers on the front page of HN who are challenging your world-changing narrative. Which will, heh, drop you on the front page of HN. Our community is, literally, eating itself at this point. There was a time when we actually took "make something people want" literally. Now it's just part of the fiction.
- neutronicus 5mo ago
  I've been frustrated with Copilot in this regard. I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools. Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!? Maybe it's changed, I haven't been paying that much attention after bouncing off of this. I've gotten mild acceleration from using gptel-mode in emacs, manually adding references to context, and having models do various mechanical transformations on code. And I've even had some limited success writing tools for it to do LSP lookups.
  - xnorswap 5mo ago
    It frustrates me too, it really feels like the next breakthrough will be when someone gets agents working "natively" with LSP on large code-bases. Anthropic added LSP support to claude-code, but the current implementation is worse than useless, because any changes aren't reflected fast enough, so it's constantly working on outdated views / compilation caches, and it gets in a right muddle between its "internal" state / understanding in context, the real-world file, and the LSP. If it could just leverage LSP to apply refactorings it would be amazing, but it feels like the LSP can't keep up, and I don't know if that's an LSP problem or a claude problem. So we binned the LSP plugin and we're back to watching a machine find/replace, because while waiting on that is slower than LSP, it's a "Action => Wait" which the tooling understands, while LSP is "Possibly Wait for LSP to catch up => Action" which it doesn't understand nearly as well. I suspect the LSP plugins also need better skills that pair with them so it reaches for them more often. It hurts my soul to see it reach for find/replace to rename a class, complete with mistakes made in complex solutions where you might have name clashes in different namespaces. Something the LSP handles without problem, but can trip up an LLM.
    - bee_rider 5mo ago
      I wonder, is the problem here that LSP is updating too slow all the time? Or just that there’s a chance it will update very slow, and you never really know if you’ll hit that chance, so your model always has to do the “long time wait” just in case? It seems like it ought to be possible for LSP to report that it is still processing, in the latter case, somehow…
- PyWoody 5mo ago
  A few days ago someone on HN commented that a teammate uses Claude to search for text in files on their own computer. Buddy... There's Command-line Tools Can Be 235x Faster Than Your Hadoop Cluster and then there's Command-line Tools Can Be ∞ Faster Than Your AI.
  - dylan604 5mo ago
    As snark, I've been using the phrase "ask GPT about it" for things that clearly do not need an LLM to be involved. The other day, I was on a zoom call and said it, only to see the present actually doing it. I hope my unmuted laugh wasn't too distracting.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- ACCount37 5mo ago
  Way too much engineering effort to make something that might get leapfrogged by the next gen LLM. It's a tantalizing thing, but far too treacherous to actually go for it, most of the time.
  - intrasight 5mo ago
    There are many domains where a hybrid of numeric and AI approaches would make sense. For example in those domains where there's already a rich practice of numeric tools such as with IC layout.
- peteforde 5mo ago
  Hey man, speak for yourself. 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.
  - nubinetwork 5mo ago
    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
    - peteforde 5mo ago
      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!
- ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
  > augment already working solutions That's exactly how I use it, but I'm just a geezer on his own, writing free software for people that can't pay for it.
- jlarocco 5mo ago
  Annoying, but not surprising. The future is using AI to do everything, and nobody gets funded saying they're taking a small step forward.
- gmueckl 5mo ago
  If its any consolation: once we've burnt the last crumb of coal, the last drop of oil and last bit of natural gas to fuel the AI overlords, that particular problem will take care of itself.
CorrectHorseBat 5mo ago
It is far from solved in IC, synthesis tools sometimes still do really stupid things and there's still quite a lot of hand-holding required to get to a working chip.
- Arodex 5mo ago
  And LLM are even stupider and need even more hand-holding The right use of AI would be to use it to create a better routing/synthesis tool, but that's not what is being worked on
PaulHoule 5mo ago
Until a few years ago it was generally understood that useful "creativity" involves solving problems within constraints, e.g. something a lot like SAT or SMT in spirit even if not in the details. Then we got LLMs which will make a good parody of anything and occasionally get it right.
kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago
Within an IC you don't have large obstructions for metal layers, distances are short, and buffers can be inserted at will to manage SI.
- pjc50 5mo ago
  It has been about 20 years since I worked on this (clock gating and clock buffering), but .. > distances are short I remember we had a catastrophic error for "wire longer than 2cm". > and buffers can be inserted at will to manage SI. Effective buffering of large nets was a massive pain. Areas where you want to buffer are inevitably areas with a very high level of placement congestion. So you push some cells out of the way to add a buffer. That ends up worsening their timing. So they need a bit more sizing/buffering. Rinse and repeat for a few hours. ( https://web.archive.org/web/20071028033035/http://www.edn.com/article/CA601818.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071028033035/http://www.edn.co... ; long since absorbed into Cadence)
monuszero 5mo ago
That precise mixed technique approach has worked well for me. I’ve been using JITX (python based circuit design with a powerful auto router). Free for personal use, and has been discussed a few times here in HN. Edit: it’s almost assumed at this point but for completeness Claude / Codex were the ones driving the OO python code and datasheet research and parsing. https://www.jitx.com/ https://www.jitx.com/
- bbourn 5mo ago
  Can you elaborate on what you mean by “it’s almost assumed..”? I’m actively working on datasheet parsing at scale at Zenode.ai, and I haven’t read anything specifically about this…
  - monuszero 5mo ago
    I sloppily glommed a lot together there. The pdf parsing was certainly the least mature capability of those that I mentioned. Got decent results with the pdf parsing tool that ships with Claude (desktop) but ultimately wrote a subagent definition to help with pdf parsing. I found myself sticking to vendors with the most parseable (or ideally html) datasheets formats TI, AD, Microchip all fine - but I did learn to love Wurth Elektronik. I looked into doing a custom RAG solution for this.. docling etc. to smooth over things like tables split between pages, Figure reading. Ultimately found their team to be responsive on discord and figured they have every incentive to solve this for me by the next time I find time for a hobby electronics project. Generally the llms were awesome at discovering the chips I needed (with a few hallucinations promptly uncovered - like a TI mux chip which didn’t exist in the automotive grade designation for that package) without a doubt shortened my search and design development time by some large factor. I remember some AWESOME solo distance driving where i voice chatted with GPT 5x doing thinks like picking the right RS485 driver ic and microcontroller pairing without needed to wade through datasheets The python is less in need of explanation I’m sure
bbourn 5mo ago
[dead]

by pjc50 5mo ago

doubled112 5mo ago

> mixed-technique approach I think my biggest annoyance with the way we rolled out AI is that nobody seemed to want to use it to augment already working solutions. Just throw everything out and have an LLM do it instead.

NateEag 5mo ago
I recently saw a Claude skill that used Claude, with no tools, as a spell checker. I wanted to hurl my laptop out to the window.
- kangalioo 5mo ago
  What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. And its spelling correctness is usually already impeccable, so what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, and how can it be achieved?
  - ceejayoz 5mo ago
    I am skeptical that AI brings any benefit to spell checking at all.
  - trollbridge 5mo ago
    AI can’t really spell check without risking changing the meaning of sentences. Spell checking was a solved problem before this.
    - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
      Spellchecking is absolutely not a solved problem. I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying. I don't know how effective LLMs are, but it's difficult to imagine they can be worse than the existing regime, which is embarrassingly bad for the decades it's been around.
      - PaulHoule 5mo ago
        Human copy editors are less than perfect too. I hired one copy editor who I could not trust to be the last person who touched a document before it went out. I had a friend who wrote an article for the New York Times: the article made a lot of sense before she submitted it, but it was edited for length and style and it definitely read like a New York Times piece but didn't completely make sense.
      - quuxplusone 5mo ago
        An interesting idea I saw long ago in some book (I thought it was K&P's "Software Tools," or my second guess was K&R1, but neither of those panned out — a strong Mandela effect) was the clever idea of a whole-document spellchecker that works purely probabilistically, by histograms: you feed it a document, it tallies the trigraphs, and any trigraph that appears only rarely is flagged as a likely typo. This approach lets through unknown-but-realistic words like "antithematory" while flagging unrealistic words like "prisencolinensinainciusol" (because of its unlikely "ciu" and "ius" clusters) and "antthemaory" (because of "ntt" and "aor"). To make this approach work better, feed it a bunch of English text (or whatever language your document is in) before the document you really want to "spellcheck." Essentially this isn't a spell "checker" so much as a spell "linter" — it looks for antipatterns statistically associated with bugs, and reports the patterns for further investigation. If anyone knows where this trigraph-based "spellchecker" was first presented, I'd love to find out again.
  - saynay 5mo ago
    AI certainly is the shiny new hammer, and it is tempting to see the world as nails. Traditional methods might not be perfect, but they also easily fit in the memory of even low power devices. Perhaps it isn't a problem worth burning a dollar of tokens for every spelling mistake.
  - sarchertech 5mo ago
    The fact that it produces correctly spelled words says nothing about it’s ability to find spelling mistakes or to correct them without errors like completely changing the word.
    - allears 5mo ago
      You mean errors like misusing "it's" when the right word is "its?"
  - Hizonner 5mo ago
    > What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? Don't do a stupid thing like that in the first place. > In comparison to non-AI traditional tools, AI has the advantage of "understanding" the text, reducing the number of "stupid" mis-corrections. I doubt it, but if that's true, run a normal spell checker, and then give the output to your LLM to filter. > what is there to gain by interfacing it with traditional solutions, About a billionfold improvement in compute efficiency, and a lower error rate. > and how can it be achieved? 10 seconds of actual thought.
  - jlarocco 5mo ago
    >What would be a better way to incorporate AI as a spell checker? You just don't need AI to do spell checking. It's a waste of energy, bandwidth and tokens. It's like Java Enterprise Fizz-Buzz - 1000x more complicated than it needs to be and complete overkill. But at least you can tell your manager you're using AI!
- gedy 5mo ago
  I swear that so many AI usecases I see are: "I did not have the skill or realize that you can write a program for this obvious logic". I guess that works if you aren't a programmer or don't want to hire somebody, but then wtf would I pay for your service or product?
- mattkrause 5mo ago
  Isn't this pretty much why language models were invented? Pasting something directly into the chat interface seems weird, but if you could somehow just see where P(token | context) falls off a cliff, that's a pretty good hint that your writing has problem.
  - lambda 5mo ago
    Yeah, but for this use case you don't need Claude. You probably want a tuned lightweight small model that can run locally. Even Haiku is massive overkill for this use case.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago
      I've done it to check transcriptions of handwritten 19th century Quebec French. Is there a dedicated spell checker for that?
- julianlam 5mo ago
  This type of laziness isn't novel. Check out left pad or the two dozen other "utility" packages that could be done in a single line of code.
ahartmetz 5mo ago
Something something bitter lesson blah blah I think the bitter lesson is severely misapplied in the current situation: If progress from "just add more resources" is very slow, and a huge amount of money is at stake, continous work on hand-engineering can give a continuous and very valuable competitive advantage. The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs, and I am reasonably sure that it's not going to happen like that.
- irthomasthomas 5mo ago
  > The labs all seem to be going for AGI through bigger LLMs I don't know if this is still the case. Labs like anthropic and openai are spending a huge amount of their time on custom model wrappers. Something which they used to leave to their customers.
ajross 5mo ago
> nobody [wants to use AI] to augment already working solutions Plenty of people do, but that only produces a blog post that will get you to the front page of HN. If you want VCs to drop $40M on your head, you need to pretend to reinvent the world. Then, to further appease the rain gods, you need to sue the bloggers on the front page of HN who are challenging your world-changing narrative. Which will, heh, drop you on the front page of HN. Our community is, literally, eating itself at this point. There was a time when we actually took "make something people want" literally. Now it's just part of the fiction.
neutronicus 5mo ago
I've been frustrated with Copilot in this regard. I work on a large C++ codebase, with large files. Human developers jump around between files with the Visual Studio fuzzy search, set breakpoints to trace execution in the Debugger, use the IDE's refactoring tools. Microsoft's answer to this was to just ... expose none of this to their Agent Mode!? Replace the working semantic autocomplete with fucking lies!? Maybe it's changed, I haven't been paying that much attention after bouncing off of this. I've gotten mild acceleration from using gptel-mode in emacs, manually adding references to context, and having models do various mechanical transformations on code. And I've even had some limited success writing tools for it to do LSP lookups.
- xnorswap 5mo ago
  It frustrates me too, it really feels like the next breakthrough will be when someone gets agents working "natively" with LSP on large code-bases. Anthropic added LSP support to claude-code, but the current implementation is worse than useless, because any changes aren't reflected fast enough, so it's constantly working on outdated views / compilation caches, and it gets in a right muddle between its "internal" state / understanding in context, the real-world file, and the LSP. If it could just leverage LSP to apply refactorings it would be amazing, but it feels like the LSP can't keep up, and I don't know if that's an LSP problem or a claude problem. So we binned the LSP plugin and we're back to watching a machine find/replace, because while waiting on that is slower than LSP, it's a "Action => Wait" which the tooling understands, while LSP is "Possibly Wait for LSP to catch up => Action" which it doesn't understand nearly as well. I suspect the LSP plugins also need better skills that pair with them so it reaches for them more often. It hurts my soul to see it reach for find/replace to rename a class, complete with mistakes made in complex solutions where you might have name clashes in different namespaces. Something the LSP handles without problem, but can trip up an LLM.
  - bee_rider 5mo ago
    I wonder, is the problem here that LSP is updating too slow all the time? Or just that there’s a chance it will update very slow, and you never really know if you’ll hit that chance, so your model always has to do the “long time wait” just in case? It seems like it ought to be possible for LSP to report that it is still processing, in the latter case, somehow…
PyWoody 5mo ago
A few days ago someone on HN commented that a teammate uses Claude to search for text in files on their own computer. Buddy... There's Command-line Tools Can Be 235x Faster Than Your Hadoop Cluster and then there's Command-line Tools Can Be ∞ Faster Than Your AI.
- dylan604 5mo ago
  As snark, I've been using the phrase "ask GPT about it" for things that clearly do not need an LLM to be involved. The other day, I was on a zoom call and said it, only to see the present actually doing it. I hope my unmuted laugh wasn't too distracting.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
ACCount37 5mo ago
Way too much engineering effort to make something that might get leapfrogged by the next gen LLM. It's a tantalizing thing, but far too treacherous to actually go for it, most of the time.
- intrasight 5mo ago
  There are many domains where a hybrid of numeric and AI approaches would make sense. For example in those domains where there's already a rich practice of numeric tools such as with IC layout.
peteforde 5mo ago
Hey man, speak for yourself. 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.
- nubinetwork 5mo ago
  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
  - peteforde 5mo ago
    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!
ChrisMarshallNY 5mo ago
> augment already working solutions That's exactly how I use it, but I'm just a geezer on his own, writing free software for people that can't pay for it.
jlarocco 5mo ago
Annoying, but not surprising. The future is using AI to do everything, and nobody gets funded saying they're taking a small step forward.
gmueckl 5mo ago
If its any consolation: once we've burnt the last crumb of coal, the last drop of oil and last bit of natural gas to fuel the AI overlords, that particular problem will take care of itself.

CorrectHorseBat 5mo ago

It is far from solved in IC, synthesis tools sometimes still do really stupid things and there's still quite a lot of hand-holding required to get to a working chip.

Arodex 5mo ago
And LLM are even stupider and need even more hand-holding The right use of AI would be to use it to create a better routing/synthesis tool, but that's not what is being worked on

PaulHoule 5mo ago

Until a few years ago it was generally understood that useful "creativity" involves solving problems within constraints, e.g. something a lot like SAT or SMT in spirit even if not in the details. Then we got LLMs which will make a good parody of anything and occasionally get it right.

kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago

Within an IC you don't have large obstructions for metal layers, distances are short, and buffers can be inserted at will to manage SI.

pjc50 5mo ago
It has been about 20 years since I worked on this (clock gating and clock buffering), but .. > distances are short I remember we had a catastrophic error for "wire longer than 2cm". > and buffers can be inserted at will to manage SI. Effective buffering of large nets was a massive pain. Areas where you want to buffer are inevitably areas with a very high level of placement congestion. So you push some cells out of the way to add a buffer. That ends up worsening their timing. So they need a bit more sizing/buffering. Rinse and repeat for a few hours. ( https://web.archive.org/web/20071028033035/http://www.edn.com/article/CA601818.html https://web.archive.org/web/20071028033035/http://www.edn.co... ; long since absorbed into Cadence)

monuszero 5mo ago

That precise mixed technique approach has worked well for me. I’ve been using JITX (python based circuit design with a powerful auto router). Free for personal use, and has been discussed a few times here in HN. Edit: it’s almost assumed at this point but for completeness Claude / Codex were the ones driving the OO python code and datasheet research and parsing. https://www.jitx.com/ https://www.jitx.com/

bbourn 5mo ago
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “it’s almost assumed..”? I’m actively working on datasheet parsing at scale at Zenode.ai, and I haven’t read anything specifically about this…
- monuszero 5mo ago
  I sloppily glommed a lot together there. The pdf parsing was certainly the least mature capability of those that I mentioned. Got decent results with the pdf parsing tool that ships with Claude (desktop) but ultimately wrote a subagent definition to help with pdf parsing. I found myself sticking to vendors with the most parseable (or ideally html) datasheets formats TI, AD, Microchip all fine - but I did learn to love Wurth Elektronik. I looked into doing a custom RAG solution for this.. docling etc. to smooth over things like tables split between pages, Figure reading. Ultimately found their team to be responsive on discord and figured they have every incentive to solve this for me by the next time I find time for a hobby electronics project. Generally the llms were awesome at discovering the chips I needed (with a few hallucinations promptly uncovered - like a TI mux chip which didn’t exist in the automotive grade designation for that package) without a doubt shortened my search and design development time by some large factor. I remember some AWESOME solo distance driving where i voice chatted with GPT 5x doing thinks like picking the right RS485 driver ic and microcontroller pairing without needed to wade through datasheets The python is less in need of explanation I’m sure

bbourn 5mo ago

[dead]