I think we're not there yet. I've been meaning to look at this flux.ai to see if it has the prompts/workflow worked out better than what I was able to cobble together in a few hours. Maybe Alteryx's MCP server would have been better. I'll try that this weekend for another board I've got.
PCB design and 3D CAD design are different topics.
Hardware Description Languages are closer to programming languages than CAD. Look at some Verilog to get an idea - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verilog
This is very unlike how FPGA and (I assume) ASIC is done. That is more like a traditional programming language but everything happens all at once (no sequence of statements outside tests, if you need that you have to write a state machine yourself). You define logic expressions between signal, add stateful latches, etc. But you never specify the physical layout.
Instead you feed your description to a tool that acts a constraint solver/optimiser that computes the layout for you (this is for FPGAs called synthesising IIRC, it is akin to a compiler). Typically quite slow, even for small circuts like we did at university it took minutes, and for large circuits it might easily days.
Now, this raises the question, what if you design a PCB net list using AI, but then use traditional autorouting and layout? I believe that can also be done, but I have no experience designing PCBs, so I don't know how well it works.
Pretty sure someone already tried throwing VLMs and diffusion models at this, wonder how that fared.
[1] https://deeppcb.ai/reinforcement-learning-pcb-routing-explai... [2] https://deeppcb.ai/cooper/ [3] https://deeppcb.ai/deeppcb-kicad-plugin-ai-pcb-routing/
Disclaimer: I work at InstaDeep, the company behind DeepPCB, but I don't work on this product.
And the two things that take up VAST amounts of time in ASIC design are testbenches and timing closure.
A LOT of hardware design is testbenches to verify things. AI is REALLY GOOD at generating things like testbenches. And nobody really cares if the quality of your testbench code sucks as long as it validates what it claims to.
I don't know how good AI is at timing closure, but I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if it is pretty good at it up to the physical point. That's lots of textual output which you can put a constraint on.
Everything involving physical design, though, tends to be a disaster waiting to happen if you let AI loose on it.
No they don't.
In my experience they are not especially good at SystemVerilog. There's a lot of knowledge about it that is locked behind paywalls and it's very niche.
My guess is the "from scratch" here is quite the exaggeration. Otherwise why did they need Broadcom?
* Physical design team (stupidly known as the "backend"). This is extremely specialised knowledge and most chip companies don't really want to have to deal with it if they can avoid it.
* IP blocks. Especially for annoying things like phys, memory controllers, USB controllers, PLLs, power, etc. These things are difficult to do, difficult to test, and often critical (good luck if your clock doesn't work...) I would not at all be surprised if Broadcom supplied CPUs too.
My total guess at what happened is Broadcom supplied most of a SoC and OpenAI added an LLM coprocessor module to it, and probably asked them to add like 10x more DRAM interfaces.