PCBWorld: A Benchmark Environment for Engine-Grounded PCB Design Automation

Abstract:PCB routing is the task of connecting the nets of a board with copper traces under strict design rules, yet learning-based methods still lag behind rule-based routers. We introduce PCBWorld, an open-source engine-grounded PCB routing environment built on KiCad, an electronic design automation (EDA) engine. As a human engineer does, agents in PCBWorld interactively route a board through the engine's native operations, guided by its Design Rule Check (DRC) feedback. The environment supports both RL and tool-using LLM agents. Alongside the environment, PCBWorld-Bench provides three board datasets in the native .kicad_pcb format, two controllable synthetic generators and 679 real open-source boards. It scores any completed board with eight engine-checked evaluation metrics, regardless of the routing method. In our experiments, agents in PCBWorld consistently outperformed grid-action RL policies and open-loop LLM baselines, and an RL policy trained only on synthetic boards transferred zero-shot to real boards, approaching rule-based routers.

Accepted to the KDD 2026 Workshop on Evaluation and Trustworthiness of Agentic AI (non-archival). Main text with appendix

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

I.2.6; I.2.8; B.7.2; J.6

arXiv:2607.05915 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2607.05915v2 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.05915 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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