We've been working on an internal project for layout of digital circuits using stochastic search and ML and have been having good results. ML and AI in general will likely have a pretty big impact on circuit design in the near future, excited to see other work in this area ^_^
Board level EE here of about 15 years here. Right now the most advanced PCB layout tool is Allegro which can route up to 20 positive layers. BUT, the autorouter is unusable. Wonder why Apple/Google/LAB126/MSFT maintain an army of "eCAD" engineers. If you can point me in the direction of any publication that your "internal project" has contributed to that would be great. IMHO, PCB layout is the most underappreciated engineering task in product development right now. At the speeds of PCI-E Gen4 the traditional lumped elements theory no longer hold good. So, interested to see whats coming my way so that i can be ready to pivot when "computers can actually make computers themselves".
>BUT, the autorouter is unusable. Wonder why Apple/Google/LAB126/MSFT maintain an army of "eCAD" engineers.
Because:
1. They're working on the cutting edge of miniaturization and autoroute functionality just doesn't cut it at that level. You need a human understanding of the end product as in consumer electronics you have to plan in advance several (often for lower cost) revisions of the same product for the future.
2. All the ML/AI experts are expensive and they have much lucrative fish to fry such as getting you to buy or click on things rather than optimize PCB aoutoroute for some eCAD company that can't justify their expense as most of their customers will still route by hand since the hardware business is very resilient to change.
3. PCB layout is done(in Western Europe at least) mostly by technicians, not engineers, and their labor costs are cheap as technical high-schools churn hundreds every year. You don't need a university degree and sometimes the company will pay your training for the eCAD tool they're using. In my area, a city with lots of hardware industry, it's basically a blue collar job.
Source: FW dev in the consumer electronics business
Also from my limited experience in Eagle, the autorouter output is terrible. I mean, it works, but it makes it very hard to "read" the layout and tweak it if necessary. Sometimes it helps do some percentage of the work, but you almost always end up ripping it all out and redoing most of it. Or running it multiple times until you get something that is semi-usable.
Perhaps some kind of GAN approach could be used to force an optimizer to perform autorouting with a bias towards "human-like" circuits that actually readable and understandable.
No publications yet unfortunately. We don't attempt to tackle the PCB problem btw, our sole focus is on IC digital circuit layout. You have to be focused to get results from ML projects in startups ;)
We've been working on an internal project for layout of digital circuits using stochastic search and ML and have been having good results. ML and AI in general will likely have a pretty big impact on circuit design in the near future, excited to see other work in this area ^_^