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Comment by Rival67 | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on several PCB projects, and agents are very helpful for automating many parts of the workflow. They're excellent for schematics. Complex routing, though, is still a human's job for now; I've watched Freerouting fall on its face many times. If you're doing six-layer high-speed DDR routing, AI won't solve that for you today.

However checkout EDA tools https://github.com/l3wi/claude-eda/ https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools

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That layout does not look very good:

https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools/blob/main/do...

I'm curious if this even works at high speed though I'm seeing what appears to be length-matched traces. Is the tool using an EM simulator in the process?

I've installed it this morning to play around with on some low-speed designs before trying a high-speed design. Looking at that specific screenshot you posted there... that looks partially like a floor planning problem to me. Looking up the part number, that Ti90G529 is an FPGA, which also suggests that the overall routing could potentially get a lot better if the pads from the part on the left-hand side were shifted to all be on the "top" or "bottom" of U3 instead of divided across it the way it is right now.

My first attempt on a low-speed not-dense board came out OK. There were a few odd choices, but I don't expect perfection from auto-routers. If nothing else, auto-routers are a good way to double-check that your floor planning is OK, even if you then rip up the auto-routed traces and hand route them instead.

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