I want to love hardware as code. I really do. I love infrastructure as code, devops as codezyou nake it. But I just don't think it's ever going to happen. At least not fully. Something about it to me just has to be graphical. Maybe it's the information density, or the fact that circuits are graphs / networks, or maybe it's just habit.
On the topic of autorouters, the post doesn't really go into why there are no open source data sets and why there aren't many open source tools. It's probably no surprise but there's a TON of money in it. The author mentions iphones and 10s of thousands of routes. That's nothing. Modern ICs have billions of transistors and billions of routes with an insanely complicated rule set governing pitch, spacing, jobs, etc. Not to mention the entire time you have to make sure the parasitic resistance and capacitance from the routing doesn't break the timing assumptions.
Cadence and Synopsys probably put billions yearly into R&D and I bet a big chunk goes into "Place & Route". I've heard that licenses for their tools run into the miions of dollars per head per year.
I had a play with the tscircuit CAD tool which they're writing this autorouter for. It's hardware-as-code, leveraging React.
I love the concept of schematics-as-code. But layout-as-code is awful. Maybe AI tools will improve it enough - but unless there's a user friendly escape hatch which lets you tweak things with a mouse, it's a dead end.
I've had the same problem with auto-generated wiring diagrams and flowcharts. Great in theory, but then the tool generates some ugly thing you can't make sense of and there's no way to change it.
There's definitely tremendous potential for AI in electronic design. But I think the really complicated bit is component selection and library management - you have to somehow keep track of component availability, size and a range of parameters which are hidden on page 7 of a PDF datasheet. Not to mention separate PDF application notes and land patterns.
Compared to all that, connecting up schematic lines and laying out a PCB is fairly straight forward.
Love that you tried the tool and couldn't agree more. We think that new layout paradigms similar to flex and CSS grid need to be invented for circuit layout. This is an active area of research for us!
On the topic of autorouters, the post doesn't really go into why there are no open source data sets and why there aren't many open source tools. It's probably no surprise but there's a TON of money in it. The author mentions iphones and 10s of thousands of routes. That's nothing. Modern ICs have billions of transistors and billions of routes with an insanely complicated rule set governing pitch, spacing, jobs, etc. Not to mention the entire time you have to make sure the parasitic resistance and capacitance from the routing doesn't break the timing assumptions.
Cadence and Synopsys probably put billions yearly into R&D and I bet a big chunk goes into "Place & Route". I've heard that licenses for their tools run into the miions of dollars per head per year.