Cherry Blossom vs Skimatly: a Skimatly alternative

Skimatly calls itself an AI schematic generator that turns natural language into IEEE-standard schematics with KiCad-quality symbols. Its about page says it was founded in 2025 to get people from an idea to a reviewable schematic draft faster, and it names students, makers, engineers and hardware startups as its audience.

There are two reasons you might look past it. The first is access: it is in closed beta, and you join a waitlist. The second is scope. Its site talks about schematics throughout and does not describe PCB layout, so a draft from Skimatly still has to be laid out somewhere else before it becomes a board.

Cherry Blossom treats the schematic as one step of several. An agent in a cloud sandbox writes the board as tscircuit code, builds it, and shows the schematic, PCB layout, 3D view and BOM together. Footprints come from real part data, a verification gate checks each AI edit, and a DRC check runs before you order through the PCBWay hand-off.

It leaves out the layout, and a switching supply's layout needs choices the schematic never shows. An AI agent built this 9 to 24 V in, 5 V at 3 A board with tscircuit, the open-source engine Cherry Blossom runs on, on our own machine, using the same version and review tool as Cherry Blossom's agent. Once the schematic was done, the layout still needed these decisions:

• Input capacitors, converter and catch diode placed as in TI's reference layout, with the 100 nF capacitor closest to the input pin.

• Copper pours on the 3 A paths, and the power nets routed first at 0.5 mm.

• The bootstrap capacitor straight across the top of the chip, on a 2.56 mm trace with no vias. In rev A that trace was about 10 mm long, with two vias, on the bottom layer.

It is not perfect. The ground path from the input capacitors to the catch diode runs about 12 mm over the top of the chip, as in TI's layout, and could be shorter. Late circuit changes reach the layout too. When an outside review added a zener diode to the enable pin, it needed a spot of its own: free space under the enable resistors, on a 4 mm trace, and no other part moved. The redone layout scored 88 out of 100 in our review. The board has not been built.

• You only need a schematic draft to review, and you will do the layout yourself in KiCad or another tool.

• You can wait for beta access and would like to help shape an early product with your feedback.

If schematics are the whole job, the best AI schematic generator roundup compares the tools that do only that. For the full board, see the roundup of AI PCB design tools.