How to Use (and not use) ChatGPT for PCB Design

Can you use ChatGPT or other generative AI tools for PCB design? Technical Consultant Zach Peterson both explores and critiques responses to PCB design-oriented ChatGPT prompts, focusing on specificity vs. generalizing, accuracy, and whether or not it's a valuable tool for finding answers to your PCB Design questions.
0:00 Intro
0:59 Things to know about ChatGPT
2:46 Ways to Use ChatGPT
8:45 Getting Technical
13:59 Context Matters
24:24 Drilling Down
27:17 PCB Design Queries?
For more PCB Design for Beginners videos, click here: • PCB Design for Beginners
For more Tech Consultant Zach Peterson videos, click here: • Technical Consultant Z...
👉 Digital Signals and Grounded Coplanar Waveguides: • Digital Signals and Gr...
👉 15 Days Free Altium Designer Access: altium.com/yt/altium-academy
Don't forget to follow us on social to stay up-to-date on the latest Altium Academy content.
👉 Follow Altium on Twitter: / altium
👉 Follow Altium on Linkedin: / altium
👉 Follow Altium on Facebook: / altiumofficial
👉 Ready to try the industry's best-in-class design experience yourself? Download it today and get started! www.altium.com/downloads?utm_...
The Altium Academy is an online experience created to bring modern education to PCB Designers and Engineers all across the world. Here you can access a vast library of free training and educational content covering everything from basic design to advanced principles and step-by-step walkthroughs. Join industry legends as they share their career knowledge, review real-life design projects, or learn how to leverage one of Altium's leading design tools. No matter your level of experience, the Altium Academy can help you become a better Designer and Engineer!
About Altium LLC
Altium LLC (ASX:ALU), a global software company based in San Diego, California, is accelerating the pace of innovation through electronics. From individual inventors to multinational corporations, more PCB designers and engineers choose Altium software to design and realize electronics-based products.
#Altium #PCBdesign #chatgpt

[@samerps]

Clearance and creepage rules are very important when it comes to designing a PCB, and most new PCB design engineers may not be aware of them. It can be a struggle trying to find which C & C values you need to have depending on the voltages in the design, and you often have to search through many tables in the standards. This is where perhaps ChatGPT might come in handy. Try the following prompts: "What are the clearance and creepage rules for PCB design?" "What is the clearance distance I need at 220 volts in a pollution degree 2 environment?" "How about the creepage distance?" ChatGPT was able to answer these questions and gave me an approximation. Perhaps you should NOT use the answers straightaway in your design, but maybe you use it as a guide or pointer to know where to look in the standards

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

To quote Ronald Reagan, "trust but verify"

[@shashankks1962]

Hey Zach, cool content as always! I wanted some info regarding multiplexing the CC lines on USB-C PD Devices i.e. Connecting 2 USB PD Devices (different power requirements) to 1 USB PD Source. Is it possible?

[@user-gs6zq7yh8o]

good guideline explanation for PCB design to people are not understand GPT tool use for which are the element ,this video will help to many other Electricals/Electronic Engineer.

[@Ritzz45]

The video we needed, thank you Zach.

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

There will be more of these, stay tuned!

[@rnjdm23]

Excellent subject and method. ChatGPT can be useful if you know how to ask it questions and, more importantly, if you know what kind of answer you're looking for.

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

Thank you, over time I've figured out which kinds of questions are worth throwing at ChatGPT and which questions are best left to my own research. Overall I find it to be a useful research tool in some areas.

[@AmirPourkashef]

Already added to "to watch" and then "watch later".

[@alexyoung6418]

Tried some of these, then got settled only with part searches, especially with ICs. It actually expanded my options quite a bit, as I don't always know what keyword to put in a search engine to come up with a potential part number. AI turns out to be pretty good with refining keywords. Half of my attempts with ChatGPT would still be useless, but the other half is already helping me save plenty of time with such searches.

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

For me it has also been a mixed bag. I've gotten totally inaccurate results on parts information or part searches, but once the plugins come into play the accuracy can get better. Other stuff with PCB knowledge or calculations has not been very great in my opinion.

[@ricardo_alonzo]

Holy yes! 😮

[@LucasFernandesAndrade]

Very cool!

[@gabriele_marocco]

Thanks for the experiments with ChatGPT! In which way do you think AI (not only ChatGPT) will change the world of PCB Design?

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

I think it's just another automation tool, and it will change the role of PCB designers to one that contains a lot of quality control tasks. Also constraint definitions will be important because the AI is basically using generative inference to determine the best solution to what would traditionally be viewed as an optimization problem, so the constraint definition is the really critical part. Right now there are place and route tools coming onto the market but if you don't define the constraints properly, you end up with a board that can't be used in a real product.

[@jineeshk2237]

Interesting!

[@dharmikmistry8781]

Excited 😀

[@err_ayyanar]

Great insights, got relief from fear of AI on PCB Design.

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

If AI still can't pick power regulators and amplifiers correctly, I think we're still all safe.

[@err_ayyanar]

@@Zachariah-Peterson I'm in different perspective, in a upcoming years AI learn these pending stuffs and will be Powerful...

[@supernumex]

It would be cool to give it your own datasheet e.g a folder of multiple pdf datasheets and query it. Some of the microcontroller datsheets are over 1000 pages, so this would help haha. Last I checked there was a character limit for the prompt.

[@stevenm8393]

There's a PDF plug-in now which can read PDFs

[@NoNeedtoFeedtheJudge]

i used it to figure out an RF Project it wasn’t really good but it pointed me in a direction And online youtube is too long to invest to figure out it wasn’t helpful

[@dd07871]

Try asking what value a resistor is with red red brown gold bands.

[@wyattr7982]

How long until ChatGPT generates better VHDL and Verilog code than Matlab?

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

I'm sure Xilinx will debut a Vivado integration, and if they don't they are seriously behind the times!

[@techydude]

I still think it's early days for conversational-AI tools for such domain-specific applications. I regularly find myself needing to already know the answer to my questions to confirm whether chatGPT is correct, or lacking context and needing more prompting, or just outright 'hallucinating' as is the popular term to describe its output. That's not a reliable tool, least of all for those who don't yet know what they don't know! I that's the trap with these generalist LLMs, its just a soup of content strung together by the probabilities of what I ask, 'informed' by the Collected Wisdom AND Ignorance Of The Internet. Although when I asked it about PCB autorouting, its responses were surprisingly balanced and mostly correct!

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

Did it tell you that autorouters are terrible tools and should never be used 🤣🤣🤣

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

Seriously though, you're right about the generalist LLM problem. Sometimes I feel like the system is just trying to tell me what I want to hear.

[@enotdetcelfer]

Would love to see what kind of engineering specific AI integration Altium can produce. Unfortunately chatGPT has been throttled down in intelligence, IMO and some others that have been using it for a few months, from just two months ago or so. It appears it's a result of everyone freaking out about AI, the pause letter, and what it could do, and they dumbed it down. Comparing similar prompts, it's shown less nuance and insight, and seems to be giving flatter and more generic answers.

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

This is a big problem with highly technical topics, context is so important, and the bot seems to be incapable of context.

[@BrooksSolveig]

@@Zachariah-Peterson I wouldn't say incapable

[@fpgaguy]

I'm 2/3 of the way through this , I see now how vague and not useful blog posts are made to form a word salad of pcb related words - but as far as being actually helpful in a pcb design - (As Borat says) this one not so much. The last 1/3 of the video, can be useful if you don't have some of the standards memorized or recently used. However, it also shows it should not be relied upon. So, again not useful for actual work - but good to know if you haven't already discovered this yourself.

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

Well that's what happens when cheap companies don't want to hire actual experts to provide technical guidance. Even the content firms that try to hire experts usually just hire some guy that took a computer class in high school, it's kind of sad when you think about it.

[@Bob-zg2zf]

😂cool topic!

[@yassinebouchoucha]

may be it' s an opportunity for Altium to fine-tune it own GPT model, or make one from scratch !

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

I"m already building it, just wait until pcbdesign.ai debuts

[@yassinebouchoucha]

@@Zachariah-Peterson will it be open-source ?

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

@@yassinebouchoucha won't be open source but will be collaborative with a dedicated technical board

[@leekepler6734]

I want the pcb AI tool: Similar as scratch, engineer could just create high level circuit units with function input and output, that then with support from chatgpt to generate all schematic that be used on Altium designer for PCB design, or auto design PCB.

[@yassinebouchoucha]

​@@leekepler6734 from my experience the electronic industry does not embrace open-source design like the IT world, especially the auto-industries, it would be the great if we input such variety of domain-specific design !

[@rv8804]

No offence but its kinda silly to use chatgpt3.5 when the results are so drastically different in the quality of the answers. You should always be using GPT4.0. You should be testing to see how far you get with the best version of the AI technology. 3.5 is already absolete even open AI said they would be retiring that model in the near future. If it was any good they wouldnt sun set it so quickly lol.

[@Zachariah-Peterson]

When we originally started making this GPT4 had just come out. I mean literally mid-research, it had just come out. Also not everyone has a subscription for GPT4 access.

[@xanatolxiii5110]

ChatGPT still couldn't outsmart Zack.