PCB-Bench: Benchmarking LLMs for PCB Placement and Routing (ICLR 2026)

teleforce1 pts0 comments

GitHub - digailab/PCB-Bench: Official implementation of PCB-Bench (ICLR 2026): A benchmark for evaluating LLMs on printed circuit board placement and routing reasoning. · GitHub

/" data-turbo-transient="true" />

Skip to content

Search or jump to...

Search code, repositories, users, issues, pull requests...

-->

Search

Clear

Search syntax tips

Provide feedback

--><br>We read every piece of feedback, and take your input very seriously.

Include my email address so I can be contacted

Cancel

Submit feedback

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly

-->

Name

Query

To see all available qualifiers, see our documentation.

Cancel

Create saved search

Sign in

/;ref_cta:Sign up;ref_loc:header logged out"}"<br>Sign up

Appearance settings

Resetting focus

You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.<br>You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.<br>You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.

Dismiss alert

{{ message }}

Uh oh!

There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

digailab

PCB-Bench

Public

Notifications<br>You must be signed in to change notification settings

Fork

Star<br>13

main

BranchesTags

Go to file

CodeOpen more actions menu

Folders and files<br>NameNameLast commit message<br>Last commit date<br>Latest commit

History<br>32 Commits<br>32 Commits

Task1-Text-Text-QA_evaluation

Task1-Text-Text-QA_evaluation

Task2-Image-Text-QA_and_CQ_evaluation

Task2-Image-Text-QA_and_CQ_evaluation

Task3-PCB_design_understanding

Task3-PCB_design_understanding

figs

figs

README.md

README.md

index.html

index.html

View all files

Repository files navigation

PCB-Bench

PCB-Bench: Benchmarking LLMs for Printed Circuit Board Placement and Routing (ICLR 2026)

📄 [OpenReview]: https://openreview.net/forum?id=Q5QLu7XTWx&referrer

🌐 [Project Page]: https://digailab.github.io/PCB-Bench/

PCB-Bench is the first comprehensive benchmark designed to systematically evaluate (multimodal) large language models (LLMs/MLLMs) in the context of PCB placement and routing . It addresses the lack of standardized benchmarks and high-fidelity datasets for real-world PCB engineering reasoning by integrating text , images , and real PCB design artifacts into a unified evaluation framework.

What's Included

PCB-Bench spans three complementary task settings and corresponding datasets:

1) Text-based reasoning (Text-to-Text QA & CQ)

~1,800 expert-written free-form QA instances

Each QA has a corresponding single-choice question (CQ) version

Total ~3,700 questions (QA + CQ)

Covers component placement , routing strategies , and design rule compliance

Covers both macro-level (global design principles) and micro-level (fine-grained implementation details), across placement and routing, with topic labels (e.g., signal integrity, EMI/EMC, power planning, differential pairs, DFM, etc.).

2) Multimodal image-text reasoning (Image-and-Text QA/CQ)

~500 problems requiring joint interpretation of PCB layout images + technical prompts

Includes choice questions , cloze-style fill-in-the-blank , and free-form QA

Covers visual-semantic subtasks such as component identification, functional block recognition, trace reasoning, via presence checking, differential-pair continuity analysis, etc.

3) Real-world PCB design comprehension (PCB Design Understanding)

174 complete real-world PCB projects collected from OSHWHub (operated by JLCPCB) (https://oshwhub.com/)

Each design includes artifacts such as schematics , placement/routing files , design descriptions , component libraries , and EDA software screenshots

Task setting: given a standalone EDA editor screenshot (no extra text/schematic provided), models generate a free-form description of the board’s function/structure/application scenario, assessing structured visual interpretation of professional PCB artifacts.

Task Formulation

PCB-Bench is organized into three task settings aligned with real engineering workflows:

Task 1: Text-to-Text QA & CQ

Evaluate PCB placement/routing knowledge via both open-ended generation and objective multiple-choice selection.

Task 2: Image-and-Text Multimodal QA & CQ

Answer questions based on PCB layout images together with textual prompts.

Task 3: PCB Design Understanding (Screenshot-to-Description)

Describe full-board PCB screenshots from EDA tools using free-form functional/structural descriptions.

Evaluation Protocol

All models are evaluated under a unified zero-shot setting across tasks (each instance is answered independently, without demonstrations or fine-tuning).

Metrics

Choice Questions (CQ): Top-1 Accuracy

Free-form QA: BERTScore and Sentence-BERT (SBERT) similarity for semantic consistency with reference answers

Task 3 (Design Understanding): additionally report Precision / Recall / F1-score to capture complementary aspects of prediction quality

Models Evaluated in the Paper

The paper benchmarks a diverse...

text bench design placement routing task

Related Articles