AI-designed radio chips look like QR codes and beat human ones

Princeton researcher Kaushik Sengupta has developed an AI that designs radio-frequency chips from scratch without human templates, producing unconventional layouts resembling QR codes that outperform human-designed chips. The work, published in IEEE Spectrum, challenges the traditional hand-crafted approach to RFIC design.

Radio-frequency chips — the parts in every phone, car radar, and satellite link that send and receive signals — have stayed a hand-crafted "dark art," mastered over years, even as CPUs and GPUs got designed by algorithm. Writing in IEEE Spectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-radio-chip-design , Princeton's Kaushik Sengupta describes teaching AI to design these RFICs from scratch, with no human templates — and the results look nothing like human work. — Read the rest https://boingboing.net/2026/06/24/ai-designed-radio-chips-look-like-qr-codes-and-beat-human-ones.html The post AI-designed radio chips look like QR codes and beat human ones https://boingboing.net/2026/06/24/ai-designed-radio-chips-look-like-qr-codes-and-beat-human-ones.html appeared first on Boing Boing https://boingboing.net .