6059

I explored ability of general-purpose AI tools to augment and accelerate design of analog electronics, focusing on where they genuinely help and where they may mislead. The results reflect the viewpoint of an analog designer using accessible AI copilots such as Microsoft Copilot, while trusted LTspice was used for circuits simulations, as a verification tool. If you haven’t done it already, I hope this article will tempt you to try using AI for your work, whether electronics is your profession or a passion.

It seems AI tools are already widely adopted in software development, yet there is far less information about how well they perform in electronics design.

This is my first try to use AI tools for practical electronics design, essentially an experiment and learning-by-doing exercise. 

I wanted to explore, in a hands‑on way, how AI can enhance the design workflow for circuits of moderate complexity. It encompassed early-stage work, such as problem definition, through to creation of actual circuits, which functionality and performance were subsequently tested by simulations. The functional tests went pretty well and performance results were fair, but not flawless.

I also wanted to find how one can ease AI co-pilots into own work. An uncomplicated way is to integrate these tools into your workflow by using master-assistant relationship - simply because human monitoring and intervention are still needed to benefit from those intelligent agents.

Regardless that AI has permeated into many areas, including circuit design, it is still in its infancy, far from being a mature technology. Ultimately, the limits of AI collaboration aren’t one‑sided — users must continually build and refine their prompt‑engineering skills to get the best results from this partnership.

The experiment and its results are documented in the attached file.