I built an AI PCB designer. The routing engine has no AI in it, here's why.

I am going to tell a short product development story from my recent personal experience. AI vs No AI, what I have chosen and why.

When it comes to deterministic systems, you always have to rethink choosing AI for what parts of the system. When I started building PCBEditor.com it was a similar challenge for me.

When you talk about PCB design, there are different stages. First schematics. You need to decide what and which electronics parts you want to use. For that, I had built a product called AI Inventory Management: you can upload the invoices of your purchases and you can use those parts for designing your PCBs.

Next is electrically valid netlists, footprints (footprint generator using AI), ball-map generation using AI. What I decided to do is a hybrid approach, which means not everything should be generated by AI. Instead, building internal libraries as well, which can be reliably used.

Then there comes the placement engine. You need to calculate the placements, so what I did is set multiple different rules like thermal warnings, electrical signal fluctuation rules, etc., and let my AI model (Fortza decide which is the best placement option to pick for the current design.