Can AI design circuit boards yet?
Developers are exploring the use of AI to design circuit boards, moving away from traditional GUI-based CAD tools toward declarative code-based approaches like atopile. While OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra has shown potential in this area, the industry is still developing benchmarks to measure the quality and reliability of AI-generated electronics.
Why it matters
Automating hardware design could significantly accelerate the development cycle for electronics, though it requires new standards for verification.
OpenAI showed GPT-6 Astra working in KiCad. We have been building a way to measure whether the circuits that come out of these models are any good.
We got pretty excited yesterday when OpenAI put a demo of GPT-6 Astra working on a circuit board in KiCad on the front page of its launch post. It is cool to see electronics show up in a major model release like this.
We are obviously still some distance from asking an AI to build an entire phone in one prompt. The demo does raise a question we have been thinking about for a while, though: how do we measure whether the electronics an AI produces are actually any good?
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