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 would expect an LLM's internal modeling to be on approximately the level of "this is a diagram of a capacitor circuit for some student's homework; electrical component calculations for homework tend to use the adding-in-reciprocal rule, because simple addition would be too straightforward for homework".

> “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????)

My experience with being an adult, in general, is that many people who went to university don't believe that any given course taught them anything meaningful.

I can absolutely believe that such people didn't learn and remember anything meaningful from those courses. Whether the course is to blame, is far more questionable.