Greetings!
We've all been there in PCB design. It takes an inordinate amount of time finding components, creating symbols and footprints, doing placement and layout, creating a BOM, ordering par....darnit, out of stock with a lead time of 13 weeks.
So, with everything done, the part needs to be replaced, the whole cycle starts over again, and, now, the part gets ordered before the circuit board, because if you've been around the block a few times, the inventory for an online order may not actually be there.
Cadence has now made the whole process easy - all that craziness is now taken care of in steps that are orchestrated and executed by their integrated AI agent. Spiffy! I find myself wishing for a Maker/Hobbyist license for this tool...
More details in Bill Wong's writeup. We also have a second article, below, from Mathworks on how to integrate agentic AI into designs.
Next week, DARPA is hosting its Lift Challenge in Dayton Ohio, which I wrote about back in December, where over 100 drone designs have been invited to compete for $6.5M in prizes to see which has the highest ratio of payload weight to unladen airframe weight.
I entered The Challenge back in January and have spent most of my after-work waking hours creating a highy optimized design. More about it, including an analysis of several other designs, as well as an overview of The Challenge rules and when the event is open for public spectating, are in my writeup, below.
I was also at the Editorial helm of this week's Electronic Design Weekly, which includes the latest week's worth of content from Electronic Design, a compendium of drone articles we've written over the years, the latest interesting links and news from other sites, as well as the weekly cartoons that Cabe and I do for fun.
enjoy,
-andyT
