Building an AI Agent for PCB Design

Building an AI Agent for PCB Design - by Luv Sheth

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AI Projects Building an AI Agent for PCB Design

Luv Sheth Aug 23, 2026

I’ve been experimenting with building a PCB design agent using AI - I give it a goal and it goes through the whole design process and gives me files that are ready to send to JLCPCB for fabrication. I show the output from my first iteration of this agent below. Thanks for reading luvsheth.com! Subscribe for free to receive new posts.

Workflow

Here’s what the agent does behind the scenes:

There are two interesting things here: How do you let the LLM reason about the electronic design? As an engineer you tend to have different rules of thumb/intuition/gut feel and the LLM has some of that but it needs stronger guardrails. I believe the answer here is simulation. I’ve used ngspice.

As a human I would rarely bother with simulation because it just takes too long for the work I do. But an AI agents time is less precious and so I have asked it to go through and simulate the circuit using spice before moving on to the next stage. This allows it to spend a bit more time doing the electronic engineering reasoning work and gives it a bit more information to work with to make good decisions.

How do you get the LLM to do PCB layout and routing? This may be controversial - use an autorouter. Freerouting is what I have used. Most humans prefer not to use one because the output is not great unless you set up a bunch of rules and by the time you’ve setup those rules as a human you may as well have manually routed it for smaller boards. But again this equation is not quite true for an LLM - the visual layout work is not easy for it but setting up autorouter rules is much quicker and easier so you add in an autorouter into the pipeline and ask the LLM to just setup the rules for it.

Ok cool but what do the boards actually look like? I ran it on two projects and I’ve posted the output below. I have also sent one of them off to get manufactured and will post the results when I receive them! Project 1: Thermocouple to UART converter

This first project is what I used as a trial project to get the agent running so there were plenty of issues and it was just like any other software project where I iterate to get this working. I won’t go through the details here because it would take a bit too long to write and is less interesting as an example of what the capability of the tool is. Prompt

“Design a K type thermocouple to UART PCB” (yes that was really it, but then there was a bunch of debugging back and forth while I bring up the tool) Output

Quite usable in my opinion. Shown below. Could be more space efficient, but other than that it seems perfectly usable.

Project 2: Design a low-light detector

I’ve attached screenshots of the conversation at the end of this post. Summary of what happened below. Prompt

Design a PCB that is powered by a coin cell and turns an indicator LED on when the ambient light levels fall low Issues

It started with recommending a blinking LED to save power but it later realized the timer circuit that it built would take up too much power - this was fine since it flagged it to me I told it to not blink the LED.

The schematic is really annoying to read. Technically fine but absolutely not how a human would write a schematic. This needs improvement.

It initially forgot the copper pour - I reminded it and told it to add it to the workflow. Wouldn’t have affected functionality but definitely a miss.

PCB size could be smaller - size optimization needs improvement.

And that was it. Output

Loading the output from the agent into JLCPCB worked great and no issues here. The only annoying this was I would have to pay $25 to assemble the coin cell holder and through hole parts so I decided to just solder those on myself.

Let’s see how it goes! I’ve uploaded the Gerber, BOM, and pick and place files in case anyone else wants to try it out: link to files. Will update with results here :) Conversation Record

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Building an AI Agent for PCB Design

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