To the left, a conventional circuit board design done by a human. To the right, a design done by TopoR, a software that designs circuits automatically.

It looks absolutely alien, yet beautiful. It doesn't care about how it looks, it doesn't care about angles and alignment. It only cares about efficiency and designs every connection to be as short as possible. It can even account for electric interference.

Humans just cannot compete.

circuits are different. I just chose two pictures off the internet to illustrate my point.

It maybe effecient, but looks like a nightmare to maintain or upgrade.

@TheBugDetective can circuit boards even be maintained/upgraded?

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As long as the machine is also doing the testing and debugging of the fully assembled board, the right result looks good to me.

@Oktokolo smaller SMD components are machine-assembled, but larger components (like roach-looking chips) are usually done by hand.

However, I've been to a factory that had put a buffet glass over the assembly lines, where employees would look through the glass while soldering components. It had been done to avoid corrosion due to breadth and sweat, but employees discovered that they could draw a map on the glass showing where each component should be placed. And look at the circuit board trough this map layer. Faster than the shitty printouts they were given.

Tests are always automated, though.

@JsonBoa: I mean final testing and debugging in practice. Like when you finally have the fully assembled board where every component, every trace and every solder joint is good - but the whole thing still doesn't work as expected. I am not in electronics R&D though. Maybe outside the hobby sphere, boards just never show unexpected behaviour.

I don’t understand the difference between red and green lines and if it is a problem if they cross

Anyway the software was human-made and it’s always a tool for humans.

@rov3rand0m Top/bottom layer, possibly also middle layers if they exist on the PCB.

The board on the right looks like an absolute nightmare, if there are any faults present, the human designed board will be easier to debug. Also short traces doesn't necessesarily mean efficiency. Improvements in chip layout is definetely a useful area for AI

@Oktokolo the whole device’s circuit is emulated and debugged there before production starts. Sending your blueprints to be turned into a working thing is akin to deployment, not compilation

@matt-jd
“short traces doesn’t mean efficiency”

Please elaborate. Given the same components and the same circuit, meaning traces’ length difference in isolation, explain how some of the traces being longer benefits efficiency. I’m genuinely curious

Consumerism on steroids.

If a psu capacitor blows up, you throw it away, bcz replacing the 50ct worth capacitor will short some inner circuits

Wow, computers doing complicated work very well. Who'd've thought.

Okay, where is the ground plane? Also, is capacitance taken into account? Line lengths of signals that must impedance match?

This looks very naive.

@Demolishun chill, it's just a pic from the internet

@kiki It's not about being longer meaning more efficiency, it is rather about the length of the trace being more or less irrelevant to efficiency especially considering having planes etc so copper cost is the same for large scale production

@Lensflare Sort of, yes. It was maybe more true in the past, but as two such examplex, if you look at the circuit boards for the various revisions of the Kurzweil K2000 synthesizer, or the Atari 400 computer, you'll find jumper wires as you look at newer revisions. Rather than incur the cost of re-designing the entire circuit board for a new revision, they just added wires where necessary (some of them with added components inline) to alter the circuit. Also, I remember mod'ing my original Playstation to be able to play copied games. That involved soldering in a new chip (again, with jumper wires). I can also remember one time WAY back in my EE days where I had to cut a couple of traces and wire in little pieces of metal (just cut the legs off some resistors, handy!) to rewire part of a store alarm circuit I was charged with designing. All of those could be seen as "upgrading" a circuit board, though I'd agree I am perhaps stretching the definition a bit.

Meh

@Lensflare also want to reply with sort off, last year i fixed an board that had some burned traces, just rerouted them with cables and it worked again

For low speed design you might be able to get away with autogenerated routing given the tool is well configured, but for multilayered high speed design it's still a big no-no in the industry.

At least it was the case a few years ago, but maybe it improved.

@PepeTheFrog WYM by complex? Every PCB in a modern computer can be designed this way, as they're now reduced to be just the connectors between immensely complex chips like GPUs. SoC technology is booming, to the point when the new absurdly performant MacBook Pro with that M1 Max is basically a small, simple PCB acting as a cradle for that oversized, overpowered SoC. It's better this way, as chips can be mass-produced with small defect rate. The only things not in this SoC are capacitors and other simple, bulky components. The MacBook power brick probably has a more complex PCB than the laptop itself.

The analogue age of huge, masterfully designed, beautiful PCBs is over. I mourn it too, you know, after all I'm a guitar pedal maker. I've seen vintage Electro-Harmonix circuits, hand-drawn.

@PepeTheFrog what area are you talking about? Medical devices? Spacecraft? In that case, yes! Spacecraft are never mass-produced, allowing for bespoke design, as they _need_ to control _everything_. To an extent, the same thing persist with medical equipment: huge budget, extensive testing, as lives are on the line.

I'm not saying TopoR will wipe out every single circuit engineer job there is. I just love how it looks and amazed by how advanced this tech is compared to old autotracers.

@PepeTheFrog also, multilayer stuff. Their website explain in detail the extent of how thought-out this software really is.

https://eremex.com/products/topor/...

https://eremex.com/products/topor/...