Claude designs electronic prototypes from start to finish

Anthropic says Claude can now design and prototype electronic hardware from start to finish. The company collaborated with Diode Computers, a company that designs and manufactures circuit boards, to test Claude Fable 5.2 on three devices: a speakerphone, a voice-assistant hub, and a handheld virtual pet.

Design process

With minimal prompting, Claude wrote specifications, drew schematics, placed components on printed circuit boards, routed copper connections, designed 3D-printable enclosures, coded firmware, and prepared parts lists. Diode assembled the circuit boards and ran the firmware under Claude’s direction.

For the speakerphone, the prompt asked for “a puck that plugs into a computer over USB-C and includes microphones and a speaker, supporting Bluetooth with a PCB antenna.” The final result was a prototype of a speakerphone that still works.

Claude went through a similar process to build the voice-assistant hub and the virtual pet, and both are also still in good working order.

Benchmarks and revisions

On Diode PCB Gym, an internal benchmark that scores models based on how well they can place components and reroute connections on board designs whose layouts have been removed, Fable 5.2 scored 69%, compared with 25% for Fable 5. On BenchCAD 2.1, a public benchmark that tests whether models can rebuild 3D parts, assemblies, and circuit boards from engineering drawings and rendered images, Fable 5.2 scored 83.5%, nearly double the score of its predecessor, Claude Fable 5.1.

When Claude noticed one of its designs wasn’t working, it would change course without being prompted to do so. For instance, when designing the speakerphone’s circuit board, which has four layers of copper, it reassigned signals to different pins on two of the chips.

Manufacturing and limitations

Diode manufactured all three boards directly from Claude’s design files, without any back-and-forth over adjustments. The Diode team told Anthropic they were surprised that they didn’t have to do this with Claude.

All three of these devices are still prototypes: they haven’t been through electrical validation, antenna tuning, thermal testing, or certification, and they weren’t designed for mass production. Since Claude wasn’t connected to test equipment or to the machines that make and assemble circuit boards, engineers at Diode had to physically build and test the prototypes.

Why it matters

Anthropic says work like this could help engineers build and test new hardware designs faster. The company plans to investigate whether Claude can design denser, faster, and more complex boards, check them in simulation, and learn from measurements taken on the finished devices.

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Sources

• anthropic.com: Claude can design electronic prototypes from start to finish \ Anthropic

This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. Company claims are reported as claims. Cover image is AI-generated.