Launches, releases, funding and papers about agents doing hardware work.
Newest first, as we log them.
51 d ago
Copperhead launched on Hacker News as an agentic circuit-board design tool that compiles designs to KiCad files and manufacturing outputs. The founder writes that it works on its own hardware representation instead of editing KiCad directly. The thread drew 250 points. No board made with Copperhead was shown, and assembled-board ordering is still planned.
55 d ago
The atopile team published EEBench, a benchmark that grades agents on 13 circuit-design tasks written in atopile. The harness builds each design and runs SPICE checks at worst-case tolerance corners. The post says Claude Opus 5 led V1 at 61.6%. One failed design used a 22 uF capacitor that gave about 11.4 uF under bias. V1 is simulation only.
2 mo ago
Dave Vandenbout ran his datasheet-to-symbol-lib Claude skill on 100 parts with 20 or more pins and diffed the results against KiCad's stock symbols. With every difference checked against the datasheet, generated symbols had a 2.77% pin error rate and the library 21.92%. The README notes that the same agent generated the symbols and judged both sides.
2 mo ago
Flux added a public MCP server to its PCB design tool in its summer update. External agents such as Claude, Cursor and Codex can query a board's live context and drive design changes. The post gives firmware headers generated from actual pin assignments and net names as one use. The update also adds a lower-cost chat mode.
3 mo ago
Cadence announced the AuraStack AI Super Agent, an agentic platform in Allegro AI Studio for PCB and advanced packaging design. It coordinates domain agents from system planning through place and route, manufacturability checks and multiphysics signoff, on the same architecture as Cadence's ChipStack agent. Cadence says it will be available in 2026 and cites 2X faster time to market.
7 mo ago
AllSpice published a paper on DRCY, a multi-agent LLM system that checks schematic connections pin by pin against component datasheets. It runs as a CI/CD action when an engineer submits a design review on AllSpice Hub and posts inline comments. A consensus agent reconciles repeated runs. The authors say it runs in production; the paper gives no accuracy figures.
