content of study:
- How AI is changing the electronics sector.
- Here are some AI tools for electronics designers:
Many of us are using artificial intelligence (AI) in a variety of everyday applications (whether we know it or not). “Self-driving technology”, smart search engines, social media, weather forecasting tools, and most mobile phone apps (facial recognition, photo apps, etc.) are becoming AI-enabled. Some of your phone-based customer service may already be AI-based. We are surrounded by AI.
But what is AI? Artificial intelligence is the “reproduction” of human intelligence processes in software, and the application may determine the complexity of the AI. AI can be used for big data analysis, sensor fusion (combining different sensor data types), speech interpretation/translation, natural language interaction, etc.
Is Skynet AI coming?
It was a shock when NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang announced (at the World Government Summit in Dubai in February 2024) that “programming will no longer be an important skill” and cited the reasoning behind this as “AI will take over coding.” But it was also a harsh reality check: AI is coming fast and furious, and no one can afford to miss it… is it really?
So far, current AI “chatters” like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, You.com (formerly YouChat), Gemini (formerly Google Bard), META Llama AI, etc., provide great answers if you know what you're asking. (Disclaimer: some answers may still be hallucinated.) This list is set to grow significantly, and there are signs that China's Baidu “Ernie Bot” is making significant improvements. Other AI tools are summarized here.
Today's AI technology is amazing: it can understand the entire web, provide detailed answers at various levels of complexity, write essays and poems, sing, draw pictures, write code, create videos, and even distinguish people from your contact list.
There are other “apps” created to cater to other segments, especially in the “customer service” space: Lyro chatbot by Tidio, KIQ agent by Kustomer, ZOHO, Cognity, etc., with more to come. Some of these agents are already “pre-trained” and can learn the company's products from the inside out, and are multilingual. AI has made its way into the medical and legal fields, so why isn't it being considered in engineering as well?
Top AI Tools in Electrical Engineering
You may have already heard that AI is helping improve chip design, optimize data processing, assist with wafer/circuit/PCB/surface inspection, enhance algorithms, improve power efficiency, etc. The chip electronic design automation (EDA) space is no exception to these enhancements.
- Synopsys.ai provides a full-stack, AI-driven EDA suite for the chip design process, including analysis performance and optimization.
- Siemens' Solido is an IC design and verification package that combines the power of AI with the scalability benefits of the cloud.
- Cadence also offers a complete portfolio of AI-enhanced tools with a wide range of applications, and using the JedAI platform as a common repository, the company is integrating AI across the EDA workflow to help chips run faster, consume less power, and reduce costs.
- ChipAI is an EU funded project that realises the potential of photonics nanotechnology to enable compact, high-bandwidth, energy-efficient CPUs using optically interconnected spiking neuron-like sources and detectors.
- ChipGPT also seeks to achieve highly efficient logic/chip design through natural interaction. It starts by instructing a large language model (LLM) to create initial Verilog code, and an output manager modifies and optimizes these programs before collecting them into a final design space. The ultimate expectation is that ChipGPT will search this design space and select the best design based on a target metric. For more complex situations, Cadence also has a project codenamed ChipGPT, which focuses on the design cleaning process, allowing designers to “examine the design, validate the specification and design, explore and fix issues, prompt analysis tasks, and receive explanations in natural language.” Note that there is another “ChIP-GPT” that is a supervised LLM for robust data extraction from biomedical database records.
AI Tools for Electricians
AI technology is already built into every EE tool set.
- CR-8000 (manufactured by Zuken) provides AI-enabled PCB placement and routing technology
- Allegro X AI features analysis tools that optimize designs for electrical, SI and thermal performance, which the company claims can reduce PCB design turnaround times by more than 10x.
- JITX offers a different approach to designing complex circuit boards by writing simple code and highly automating existing design processes. This “AI tool” can be integrated with other existing tools (Altium, KiCAD, Cadence, etc.).
- Cady reviews netlist files and bills of materials (BOMs), validates all circuits against datasheets, ensures pinouts are set correctly, and also generates AI-powered Electrical Rule Checks (ERCs) and Design Rule Checks (DRCs).
- Quilter is aimed at beginners who need help with PCB layout, with the lofty ambition of building “the equivalent of a software compiler for circuit boards.”
- TechSpec is an AI assistant for understanding hardware component datasheets. It currently has a huge part data base and over 100 industry-specific books to provide easy information for component analysis.
- ACE's Circuit Mind allows you to create complete circuits as hardware architectures from requirements (or building blocks) with pre-defined trade-offs (cost, power, size). It then generates schematics and layouts in minutes from trillions of component choices, creating a complete “realistic” BOM. This gives you the added benefit of being able to explore multiple circuit configurations and trade-off parts availability (based on target volume) and other constraints.
- Flux for EE designs include schematics and layouts, integrate with multiple platforms (including mobile, allowing teamwork on the same design), and come with a “co-pilot” to help answer tough design questions, all in the same interface.
- Circuit Tree allows you to instantly create embedded schematics/placement/layout. You can also export designs to Cadence OrCAD, Mentor Pads, Eagle and Altium. A wide range of parts are available from Atmel, NVIDIA, NXP, STMicroelectronics and more. Generate real-time costed BOMs from Octopart, including PCBs.
And for everyday product design, you can now feed a complete datasheet or user manual into an AI chatbot and get instant answers for any part. You can even add other components to the picture to get a more or less “sensible” answer.
AI's Partner in Electrical Engineering
AI won't be working on a lab bench (at least not yet, unless we see Sophia, Atlas, Eve, Phoenix, Astribot S1, Unitree G1, or robotic versions of them in action as EE engineers). It's clear that the benefits AI brings to the EE design cycle (broader component search, alternative part selection, tolerance checking, FEA, power analysis, signal integrity, safety/EMI/EMC/ESD/EFT enhancements, regulatory compliance, security enhancements, cost/manufacturing efficiencies, etc.) will all help us create better products in the future. This new technology will be at our disposal. We cannot ignore it, we must embrace it.
It's not a question of “if” but “when” when all design tools (computerized and bench equipment) will be AI-enabled and interconnected, allowing us to work side-by-side and collaboratively with our AI comrades.
After all, AI is just another tool (giant Swiss semi-autonomous tool) that we (engineers) need to master and use efficiently. As someone said, “It's not AI that will take your job, it's people with AI skills” (Anonymous). So the challenge for everyone is to step up and master the AI engineering agency sector. Let's use this amazing tool to empower ourselves, be more productive, think more forward and focus on how to create new products and markets.
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