PCBWorld: A Benchmark Environment for Engine-Grounded PCB Design Automation
For researchers in PCB design automation, this provides a realistic benchmark and interactive environment that bridges the gap between learning-based methods and rule-based routers.
PCBWorld introduces an open-source, engine-grounded PCB routing environment built on KiCad EDA, enabling interactive routing with design rule feedback. Agents using this environment outperformed grid-action RL policies and open-loop LLM baselines, with an RL policy trained on synthetic boards transferring zero-shot to real boards, approaching rule-based routers.
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 the KiCad EDA engine. As a human engineer does, agents in PCBWorld interactively route a board through the engine's native operations, using its Design Rule Check (DRC) feedback to keep the routing within the design rules. The environment supports both RL policies and tool-using LLM agents. Alongside the environment, PCBWorld-Bench provides three dataset families in KiCad's native board format (.kicad_pcb), covering two types of controllable synthetic instances 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. These results position the engine-grounded, interactive approach of PCBWorld as a promising foundation for advancing the routing ability of both RL and LLM agents.