Pinscope

Pinscope reviews schematics the way a good senior engineer does: with the datasheets open.

Give it a netlist, a BOM, and your datasheet PDFs. It builds a graph of your design, reads each IC's datasheet, and checks the circuit around every part against what the manufacturer actually specifies — reference application, pin functions, absolute maximums, recommended operating conditions. Every finding points at the datasheet page that backs it up, so you can judge the call yourself instead of trusting a black box.

The reason it exists: ERC passes boards that don't work. Your EDA tool has no idea that the CH340E you powered from 5 V drives its TXD at 4.5 V into an MCU pin that maxes out at 3.6 V, or that the net you labeled UART5_TX lands on a pin whose alternate-function table only offers UART5_RX, or that the LDO's bypass pin you left floating costs you an order of magnitude in output noise. None of that is an electrical rule violation. All of it is in the datasheet, and nobody has time to re-read 400 pages per part on every revision.

How it works

1. Parse the BOM (CSV/XLSX) and netlist (PADS-PCB .asc or EDIF 2.0.0 .edn — exportable from KiCad, Altium, OrCAD, Allegro, Xpedition, EasyEDA, Eagle) into a queryable bipartite graph of components and nets.
2. Extract pin tables and specs from the PDFs. Large datasheets are trimmed to the relevant pages first, and every extraction is cached in a shared library, so a given part number is only ever processed once.
3. Review each IC in isolation. The model gets the trimmed datasheet plus that IC's circuit neighborhood, can query the graph (find_connected_components, get_net_for_pin, get_pintable) and pull pages from a connected part's datasheet when a finding spans an interface. It files findings with severity, reasoning, and page citations.
4. Compute the deterministic parts deterministically — BOM roll-up and a capacitor voltage-derating table come straight from the graph, no model involved.

A post-pass normalizes findings conservatively: it can merge duplicates and downgrade severity, never upgrade. If the reviewer hedged, the report hedges.

It's a reviewer, not an oracle. It misses things, and it will occasionally question a choice you made on purpose — that's what the citations are for.

Try it on the bundled design

simple_project/ is a small MSPM0G3507 board with a CH340E USB-UART bridge and an SPX3819 LDO. Run it through and Pinscope flags, among other things, the LDO's bypass pin left unconnected (~300 µV_RMS output noise instead of ~40) and the 5 V-powered CH340E driving the 3.3 V MCU directly — each with the page reference to check its work.

You need Python 3.12+, Node 20+, and an Anthropic API key:

pip install -r backend/requirements.txt
cp backend/.env.example .env                 # set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY
python3 scripts/upload_skills.py --update    # one-time: registers the extraction prompts under your account
python3 -m uvicorn backend.main:app --reload
cd frontend && npm install && npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000, create a project, and feed it the netlist and BOM from simple_project/ plus datasheet PDFs for the ICs — grab those from the manufacturers, or set the optional DigiKey API keys and let it fetch them. Everything runs locally against your own key; projects and the extraction library live in data/. Architecture notes are in CLAUDE.md.

Hosted version

This repo is the product minus accounts and billing. If you'd rather not run it yourself, pinscope.ai is the same code, hosted, with team workspaces and a shared parts library that's already warm.

License

AGPL-3.0. For commercial licensing, write to dev@faradworks.com.