YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design

LLMs have a long way to go in the world of EDA.

A few months ago I saw a post on LinkedIn where someone fed the leading LLMs a counter-intuitively drawn circuit with 3 capacitors in parallel and asked what the total capacitance was. Not a single one got it correct - not only did they say the caps were in series (they were not) it even got the series capacitance calculations wrong. I couldn’t believe they whiffed it and had to check myself and sure enough I got the same results as the author and tried all types of prompt magic to get the right answer… no dice.

I also saw an ad for an AI tool that’s designed to help you understand schematics. In its pitch to you, it’s showing what looks like a fairly generic guitar distortion pedal circuit and does manage to correctly identify a capacitor as blocking DC but failed to mention it also functions as a component in an RC high-pass filter. I chuckled when the voice over proudly claims “they didn’t even teach me this in 4 years of Electrical Engineering!” (Really? They don’t teach how capacitors block DC and how RC filters work????)

If you’re in this space you probably need to compile your own carefully curated codex and train something more specialized. The general purpose ones struggle too much.

I still have nightmares about the entry level EE class I was required to take for a CS degree.

RC circuits man.

I dropped EE entirely and switched from Computer Engineering to Computer Science because of my entry level EE course professor. I know I'm not the only person pushed away from EE due to Neil Cotter. Boggles my mind why he's still allowed to be the gateway to that discipline for so many people.

Most entry level engineering classes (first 3/4 semesters) in most of Europe (all kinds) are designed to gate keep.

I graduated in chemistry, and Chemistry 1 in engineering had tests much more difficult than any other Chemistry 1 in any other faculty. After noticing that the same pattern applied to Physics 1 or Calculus I started realizing it was an engineering thing, which was later confirmed to me by an associate professor that was the design.

I asked him why, and he told me that it's a long established thing that you don't want people that struggle with science fundamentals to build bridges, ships or electrical circuits so the first semesters are very focused on this weeding.