Transforming PCB Design with AI-Powered Placement Tools

We already know that designing a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) takes precision, expertise, and a whole lot of time. The manual process of placing components often feels like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, eating up hours as you adjust to meet constraints and optimize performance. But what if there was a faster, smarter way to do it?

That’s where AI-powered PCB layout tools come in, transforming how engineers handle PCB placement and routing. These tools automate complex tasks, boost accuracy, and create optimized boards—all while cutting down the time it takes to get products to market.

DeepPCB has already shaken up PCB routing. Now, we’re going back to tackle placement—a critical step that comes before routing. By combining reinforcement learning (RL) with a deep understanding of PCB design, DeepPCB delivers solutions that save time, reduce effort, and improve design quality.

In this article, we’ll break down the challenges of manual PCB placement, show you how DeepPCB solves them, and explain how you can get started with this game-changing tool.

The Challenges of Traditional PCB Placement  

PCB placement is one of the most critical and time-consuming steps in designing a circuit board. It’s a delicate balance – engineers must ensure each component adheres to electrical and mechanical constraints while also optimizing for factors like signal integrity and manufacturing feasibility.

Why Manual Placement Falls Short  

Time-Consuming: Manually placing hundreds or thousands of components is arduous and prone to delays.
Complex Constraints: Designers must juggle electrical design rules and routing limitations, making the process overwhelming.
Human Error: Even the best engineers can make mistakes, leading to errors that require lengthy revisions.

This bottleneck in PCB design can impact project timelines, increase costs, and slow down innovation and time to market.

Success in Automating PCB Routing  

We’ve seen how automation transforms PCB routing. DeepPCB’s AI-powered routing tool has already tackled this challenge, delivering Design Rule Check (DRC)-clean layouts, minimizing vias to improve signal quality, and offering support for differential pairs, multi-planes, and dynamic wire widths–among others.

For placement we’re taking the next step. After a beta phase that gathered invaluable feedback, DeepPCB Placement has moved out of beta!

DeepPCB Placement Is Here  

With DeepPCB PCB component placement is automated in just a few clicks.

Key Features

Human-Like Placement: We integrated your feedback to make our AI Placement closer to what a human designer would do, but faster.
AI-Driven Placement Optimization: Using reinforcement learning, DeepPCB delivers component placements that best utilize space, minimize routing challenges, and adhere to design constraints.  
Cloud-Native Accessibility: Built on Google Cloud, DeepPCB offers scalability and robust performance without requiring local hardware upgrades.

How to Get Started with DeepPCB Placement  

DeepPCB Placement supports boards with up to 1,000 components and 2,200 pins, and getting started is as simple as it is powerful. Follow these steps to transform your PCB design process today.
Sign Up for a Free Trial: Start by signing up for DeepPCB’s free trial, which gives you access to 2 hours of Placement for boards with up to 100 components. This gives you a test drive of the capabilities and potential of DeepPCB Placement before committing.
Upload Your Design: Upload your board file, set your design constraints, and choose Placement optimization as your focus.
Consume AI Credits: Similar to DeepPCB’s routing, the placement tool uses a flexible pay-as-you-go AI credits model. This ensures you’re only paying for what you use.
Finalize and Iterate: Whether you’re designing a simple board or an enterprise-grade PCB, DeepPCB generates optimized placements tailored to your constraints.

By using DeepPCB’s tools for both placement and routing, you can close the Place & Route loop, making your workflow faster, smarter, and more efficient than ever before.

DeepPCB in Action: Optimizing Placement for Faster, Cleaner Routing

We know that the best way to evaluate a design’s placement is to look at the bigger picture: the final result, post-routing. So let’s do just that!

Simple Example: Immediate Benefits of AI Placement

Consider a board featuring a fixed chip surrounded by 48 capacitors. We compare two placements:

• Quick Placement (2 minutes): Routing takes 10 hours, producing complex traces and numerous vias (left image).
• Optimized Placement (30 minutes): Routing finishes in just 59 minutes, yielding cleaner, simpler traces with significantly fewer vias (right image).

Clearly, investing more time in optimized placement drastically reduces routing complexity and overall time.

Realistic Example: Scaling Benefits for Complex Boards

To show the added value of Placement for more complex designs, let’s take a look at the following board, unplaced, i.e. with some components sitting outside the board’s boundary. Here’s the source of this board.

Now let’s start the placement process in DeepPCB. On the left, we see the first placement solution that the AI finds after 6 minutes of running, and on the right the solution after 14 hours of running.

Let’s now see if we can route those two boards. On the left, we see routing started from the placement that was found after 6 minutes. The routing gets completed after 7 hours of running. After 24 hours, the best routing solution has 111 vias–see image on the left. When we start a routing from the board whose placement has been optimized for longer, the board gets fully connected in 4 hours and 30 minutes. After 6 hours of routing, we get to 79 vias. The board is on the right.

Conclusion: DeepPCB’s optimized placement translates directly into shorter routing times, simpler traces, fewer vias, and substantial time and cost savings for PCB design projects.

Simplify Your PCB Designs with DeepPCB  

With the introduction of AI-powered Placement, DeepPCB cements its role as a leader in autonomous PCB design tools. By automating the most tedious and error-prone aspects of PCB design, InstaDeep is empowering hardware and electrical engineers to focus on creativity and innovation.

Whether you’re designing boards for cutting-edge consumer electronics, lifesaving medical devices, or next-generation IoT products, DeepPCB offers the tools you need to succeed.  

>>   Now is the time to join the AI revolution in PCB design. Visit DeepPCB.ai to start your free trial, explore the benefits of automated placement and routing, and take the first step toward effortless PCB design. You can meet the team at Hardware Pioneers Max in London, UK, on April 23rd-24th, as well as at PCBEast in Boxborough, MA, USA, on April 30th. For the latest updates, stay connected with us on LinkedIn and X.