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. In PCBWorld, agents interactively route a board through the engine's native operations, using its Design Rule Check (DRC) feedback to ensure routing adheres to design rules. The environment supports both RL policies and tool-using LLM agents.
Accompanying this 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.
Blogger's Review: The introduction of PCBWorld invigorates the realm of PCB design automation, especially in the integration of RL and LLM agent operations. Its evaluation mechanism based on real datasets also provides a solid comparative foundation for future research, propelling advances in intelligent design. Looking forward to more application cases and optimization strategies in the future!