There is no doubt that more engineers are under pressure to adopt AI especially in product development and design. A recent poll conducted by Newark finds that the majority of engineers now trust AI in their component selection for their designs.
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The poll, which surveyed 528 engineers and designers, asked if they would trust AI to select components for their next design. The results show that 87% of respondents trust AI to play at least some role in their component selection for their designs. Of these respondents, 22% said they would “completely” trust AI to select components, 49% would accept specific input and 16% would accept limited input.
Newark said the survey indicates that while engineers believe AI will increasing help with component selection in the future, there is still concern about intentional or unintentional bias in AI systems. Some designers said they would trust AI to play a limited role in selection that would also include reviews and checks conducted by them. They also believe that humans will always be required as part of the selection process, particularly for safety-critical and innovative designs.
One respondent said, “That comes with the caveat that I’d reserve the right to vet everything the AI selected. In this capacity, AI would be used as an enhanced search engine of sorts.”
On the other hand, another respondent said: “I don’t see why AI couldn’t be fully integrated into the component selection process. Hardware design is fundamentally composed of patterns. It’s just a matter of time until people discover ways to get online netlists and schematic PDFs and use them as good AI training data. In fact, AI will even be able to improve on them once there are better digital representations of devices and what’s inside them, coupled with telemetry from all of the subsystems. AI has a deep and rich well of sources to draw from that will enable it to learn even more. There are already completely generic AI systems that can do impressive, if limited selection, even building up simple VHDL for example. It’s specifying what logic to use and how to assemble it. AI is already writing code for me. All I need to do is vet it.”
The results show that opinions vary among engineers, but overwhelmingly most agree that the AI results need to be checked or verified by the designer.
“Our survey results clearly show that engineers are beginning to see a path for AI’s place in terms of component selection in their designs, especially where safety or innovation are considerations,” said Cliff Ortmeyer, global head of technical marketing and solutions development at Newark, in a statement. “As AI models get more sophisticated, it seems clear that they will become more useful for modelling designs, selecting components, shortening design cycles and reducing time to market of new products.”
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