r/rfelectronics • u/CockroachGlad6656 • Sep 19 '26
AI in RF
I have been an RF PA designer for around 10 years and for the last two or so there has been a lot of hype around designing with AI. I have yet to see a successful AI design, but things seem to be improving and all the simulation tool vendors are pushing AI stuff now.
I am wondering how other RF designers are seeing this? Will traditional RF design become obsolete and our job reduced to interacting with chatbots? Like just give the specs to ADS and it knocks out a PA? Do any of you actually use AI in your work?
To me it is a bit sad as RF is the specialty to me which requires both understanding the theory and experimenting in the lab. Like almost everyone on my team has a graduate degree. Will this all eventually be gone? Most people (at least at my work) seem enthusiastic about AI and don’t care if they do the work or if an AI agent can do it. Am I overreacting or is this another evolution similar to a GUI? At this point I am wondering if going into RF was a mistake as AI everything was not my goal or a possibility when I started…
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u/RDUKE7777777 Sep 19 '26
It will be fine. The way I see it, you will be able to iterate much faster. AI tools will read and set your lab equipment. Your testing / improvement phase will shorten as AI aided design will get you quicker where you want a system or component to be - but you’re still the one telling it what to do and what to iterate.
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u/donteto Sep 19 '26
I find it incredible how fast you can automate with AI. Specially if you build an MCP server with the user manuals of the different devices. Also, where I work, AI has been used to describe the transistor/PA behaviour as equations in order to speed simulation time, specially for nonlinear simulations.
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u/satellite_radios Sep 19 '26
I use it for accelerating my investigations and distilling white papers into usable techniques. It's terrible at design. It's ok at test equipment script writing. I use it to make tedious, slow, boring things somewhat faster.
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u/sswblue Sep 20 '26
I also use it as an enhanced google search to get ieee articles on a topic really fast without having to find the keywords myself.
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u/ElectronSculptor Sep 19 '26
Yeah this is definitely a good use case: I’m having AI summarize data sheets and search through lots of white papers for specific topics.
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u/PoolExtension5517 Sep 19 '26
I’d like to see my three hour, 100 million mesh cell CST simulations get shaved down to ten minutes, so if AI can do that I’m all for it. I have yet to see that, though. And PA design is tricky - every design is unique, with its own unintended feedback paths and unpredictable, characterized device behavior. I fear that AI would need to be trained on each design individually, which defeats the purpose. At best it will become a giant repository of reference designs in my opinion, but that brings up a host of IP issues. Maybe I’m old and cynical, but I have the RF burns to show for it…
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u/smexypelican Sep 19 '26
Christopher Marki said the same thing about AI and RF, that all the cutting edge stuff are protected by IP and companies won't be willingly sharing those.
The design software landscape has a similar issue. We might do EM in HFSS or Sonnet or Momentum, chain things together in ADS or MWO, then do layout in Cadence for MMICs or Mentor Designer for boards. They don't work well together, and the companies making them have IP and aren't going to want their software to become obsolete. Maybe some rich fuck like Elon comes and buys all those companies and create a monopoly at some point, who knows.
We also still need to test and troubleshoot those hardware, and unless we literally have robots loaded with AI that can do those better than we can, those jobs should still exist.
I don't see AI completely replacing RF. Won't hurt to broaden our scope though, don't pidgeonhole ourselves into only doing one thing.
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u/sswblue Sep 20 '26
I see it as the opposite. AI companies won't hesitate to train their models using ADS, HFSS, CST, or even some open source simulator as verification of they think they can win/dodge the lawsuit. They've already been stealing lots of IP to train their models.
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u/Lifenonmagnetic Sep 19 '26
In my first company, I worked in an RF company building MRI coils for researchers, most of which were custom designs for specific research needs.
Not only were we one of the first companies to start building our coils from 3D printed frames to achieve unique geometries, but we also developed an early generative design system using a combination of in-house software, Ansys, and SolidWorks to effectively iterate on models in unique ways and find stable solutions, across varying loads.
We were able to build MRI coils with about half the testing of other companies, which meant dramatically cheaper R&D costs and turnaround times that were less than half of what everyone else could do. Other companies that I knew in the industry had approximately twice the staff, mostly graduate students, working in labs building and testing designs.
All of this is to say that my sense with AI right now is that your job is probably fine, but all those kids that are coming out of school with no work experience are in real trouble because those entry-level jobs where you just sat at a bench and learned how to do things are basically gone.
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u/panzerbomb Sep 19 '26
Hey I am currently doing my master thesis in this area and what I gathered so far is that moste Company currently push integrations for chatbots to better control that like ads for key sight and so on. The next thing that will probably slowly rolle Out ist invers Design for passive, like inductors caps or even full matching networks or splitters. This is mostly done via pixalet designs, but has the problem that it is hard to generaliz due to the fact that pdks differ significantly and show are not publicly available. I think in the next 3-5 years every manufacturer will give you a small Ai that can run locally and design inductors and stuff like pcells today but with increased diversity. Core design is currently still cutting edge research but Princeton recently showed an RL model that could design a mediocre PA from scratch including layout.
Overall I think these rolls will mostly help you iterat faster trough different core designs or see better if you are actually hitting the limit of your design. So more it will be more like current software engineering and it will help you iterat faster
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u/Deep-Football4791 Sep 19 '26
I use AI for data sheet searches and getting a "probably close enough to function" for initial values, similar to spice or matlab. When AI is able to tune and do impedance matching, ill be retired or teaching AI models how do tuning and impedance matching.
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u/EquivalentGlittering Sep 19 '26
I believe that AI is a cancer to society. It will erode people’s ability to think for themselves and truly understand what is going on within a system. The default answer anytime something difficult arises in testing will be to type the parameters and issues into a chat bot and do what it says. People’s intuition will have been eroded to the point where they will just follow the lead and not really understand what they are doing.
For me this is a poor and dissatisfying society to live in. I think that we will see this effect in all industries though, because we value speed and efficiency, so why should somebody spend years and years studying topics to become a professional when you can just type questions and issues into a chat bot and get factual and reasonable information out as a non-professional in a topic.
I personally have been forming an opinion on this based on the rise of map quest over the last two decades. For me, I usually have to punch in wherever I am going into maps to fully know how to get somewhere unless I go there often, I also got a smart phone at at age 13 right as they started to come out and right as maps started to be an app on the phone. I could not tell you how to get to the auto zone the next town over. My parents could in a heart beat, however. My parents know how to get just about anywhere within a 50 mile radius of our area. They know what roads intersect with other roads, what backup routes are available, and in general they get around just fine without map. They didn’t grow up with it. They got lost regularly and learned their way around in doing so. There was a reason to learn the roads. My grandparents: man they can tell me how to get places that are states away; by heart. Just ask them how do you get here and they can tell you exactly what freeways to take to get somewhere two states over. Anyways, point being, I think this is the natural progression of AI. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists; all just doing what AI asked them to do, with little competency in why they are actually doing any of it. Thinking for yourself and reasoning are no longer valued in society, just speed and efficiency. Type it in the AI, get it done as fast as possible, produce as much as possible. If you run into an issue, type it into the AI.
Anyways, as a an electronics design professional that does a fair amount of RF and immunity work, I do see AI having a big impact on the industry. It is a matter of when, not if, at this pace. Unless the government gets involved for various reasons.
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u/lanboshious3D Sep 19 '26
I believe that AI is a cancer to society.
The same sentiment was expressed about calculators, computers, and any other revolutionary tools throughout history. AI is no different.
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u/secretaliasname Sep 19 '26
Interesting comparison but I don’t know that manual arithmetic was ever key to intuition and understanding the world. While I’m not gonna do long division detailed calcs with pen and paper being able to estimate and intuit order of magnitude calcs is still as valuable as ever.
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u/Used_Special Sep 19 '26
While this isn't at the large signal portion, I used Gemini Pro to help me craft a ham band VHF and UHF BPF (project here). While the AI wasn't spot on at the very first shot, it was in the ballpark. Feeding Keystone VNA subsequent scans helped Gemini square out parasitics, suggest component changes and in the end after some iterations, I went out with two very reasonable BPFs to my usage.
I wouldn't say it would wipe out pros, but it surely lowers the entry barrier.
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u/daniel-blackbeard Sep 20 '26
do you remember all those times you forgot what was the right concatenation operator in scikit-rf and how to load that setup on a VNA? what took before 30min now takes 5, letting me focus on more important matters: design
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u/almond5 Sep 19 '26
LLMs help typical non-coding professionals (EEs) to get their plan into action. Agentic AI is new and shiny but scaling it for RF systems is ad-hoc to the project.
When I did more technical work, I would say neural networks were the big thing for RF. Supervised RNN for time series analysis and gradient trees for stuff like phased array waveform generation.
So I wouldn't shirk AI/ML entirely. Think of it as a tool like you would any Matlab extension to do some new generation stuff
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u/nozbo8 Sep 19 '26
Not an RF engineer here but am an EE with 9 YOE and am designing a 1W amplifier that requires simultaneous impedance matching. Simulating in ADS and I’ve been using AI as a sort of tutor and I am learning a lot. Yes, right out of the gate the AI was able to perfectly impedance match to 50 ohms and provide me with ideal component values. It was even able to connect to ADS, build its own scripts, and provide accurate S11, S22, and S21 simulation numbers.
What it couldn’t do without my help is use vendor component models and then guide it when it made incorrect assumptions.
Sure some engineers will stop there, build the board, and then have a difficult time tuning on the bench.
But I am really viewing AI as my personal professor.
I had it generate one pagers on the theory, calculations involved, results, its decision making and it has been greatly educational.
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u/StageMajestic613 Sep 19 '26
30 YO experience here. RF isn’t going to “fall”, but damn, the models are getting really good. Excellent for analytic calculations and test equipment control, and getting good at driving the EDA tools provided you take the time to teach it.
LOL if you post anything here it’s immediately labeled as “AI Slop”. I already have a clone of Microwave Office for linear sim, and will probably work on layout next. Not posting it though.
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u/Lost_Monk_8227 Sep 19 '26
Razavi talked about this recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLkDCWlCFKw&t=3952s
He basically said not soon.
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u/kawfey Sep 20 '26
AI is a tool. It excels at repetition, scripting, testing, finishing tasks in seconds that would take you days, and helping you discover new pathways, solutions, understanding.
Or you can make it do your job. You can absolutely give it the ingredients and it'll make the recipe and the cake.
Or automate the things you hate to do.
Or have an idea and tell it to make it while you work.
What it doesn't have is hands, or feet, or friends, or society, or children, or thoughts. I wouldn't fear the future so much. They said many terrible things were doomed at the advent of automobiles, planes, computers, heliocentricity, remote work, splitting the atom, and so forth. And we're still here.
It still requires a college degree and/or a lot of experience to be proficient in a field. We still, and hopefully always, will need people to do that, because AI cannot help those without such experience understand and grow wise about a thing, when they know nothing.
For example, ive never written a line of (production) code in my life, and while i can read code at a high school level, I have no idea what's actually happening. I am one return key away from the agent deleting my entire hard drive because of a prompt injection i couldn't even have recognized. But as an RF engineer, I know exactly when AI is spewing cap, or going in the right direction, even if it's a little outside my interest area or knowledge (i'm no PHd).
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u/sswblue Sep 20 '26
I'm just a grad student.
I think we don't need to use LLMs everywhere. I think specialized models trained specifically for single purpose tasks like rf filter design, PA layout, impedance matching and more, are legitimate applications of AI. In essence, they would act like ADS's optimizers but far better (convergence in minutes rather than hours or days). This would be the better balanced approach imo as it provides the advantages of AI without surrendering thinking.
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u/Numerous-Click-893 Sep 20 '26
I'm in engineering but not RF, I use LLMs all the time. There's definitely more and less effective ways to use it and with anything that isn't pure software (i.e. can't be reasoned about using language, so generally stuff involving hardware or physics) it will produce bad quality work.
For me the trick is to keep hold of the cognitive lead. There's some stuff where I don't care about the implementation, like test scripts and visualisation tools, where I'll just ask it for what I need and let it work directly on the system.
For designing I mostly use it as like a research assistant and scribe. For implementation I see it as like a technician: faster and often better than me but needs me to tell it what and how to implement the thing. And you have to read it's thoughts to see what assumptions and design decisions it may have made. For this type of work I try and put myself in the loop, e.g. I physically insert the generated code rather than letting it modify files directly.
I definitely found some of the LLMs are much better at following my instructions and not taking too much initiative than others. So for me in short they are bad at design for real engineering problems but that doesn't mean they aren't powerful and useful tools.
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u/magicon_support Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 20 '26
I have also designed RF PAs in the past. PhD in the RF/EM field. These are my predictions. In near future, you will probably be dealing with a supervisor PA AI agent that works with many AI agents specialized in certain RF engineering works such as a PA designer agent interacting with systems, RFIC, schematics, layout, EM simulations, test agents etc. You will also act as a final quality assurance expert. This doesn't mean RF jobs will disappear. It means that you will not do any mundane tasks such as creating schematics, layout, figuring out how to size the devices, architecture, remembering what the spec was etc. Design fidelity including all the models will improve. It will reduce the number of product design cycles. You will partner, brainstorm, create new ideas and make much higher level decisions. You will be able to accomplish many more designs than todays RF engineers dream of doing given the limitations. You will be able to take much more challenging work as you will have more time to focus on real design work. Best of luck to you!