Work · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to GPU-Based Autorouting for KiCad

This project began when I decided it would be easier to write an autorouter than route a 8000+ net backplane by hand. This is a KiCad plugin with a few different algorithms, the coolest of which is a 'Manhattan routing grid' autorouter that routes along orthogonal traces. The basic idea was to steal an algorithm from FPGA routing and apply it to PCBs. I'm using CuPy for speeding up the routing; CPU-bound is at least 10x slower than the GPU version. This is in a very pre-alpha state, but it does _technically_ work. It's not great by any measure but then again it is an autorouter. I have a…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

1
FastRouter.aifree tier, from $199/mo▲364
Route requests to the right LLM for cost, latency & quality
21d ago · fastrouter.ai · its alternatives →
2RA
Recursively apply patterns for pathfinding▲26
I've been begrudgingly working on autorouters for 2 years, looking for new techniques or modern methods that might allow AI to create circuit boards. One of the biggest problems in my view for training an AI to do autorouting is the traditional grid-based representation of autorouting problems which challenges spatial understanding. But we know that vision models are very good at classifying, so I wondered if we could train a model to output a path as a classification. But then how do you represent the path? This lead me down the track of trying to build an autorouter that represented paths…
Feb 2026 · pattern-pathfinder.vercel.app · its alternatives →
3
A physically-based GPU ray tracer written in Julia▲198
We ported pbrt-v4 to Julia and built it into a Makie backend. Any Makie plot can now be rendered with physically-based path tracing. Julia compiles user-defined physics directly into GPU kernels, so anyone can extend the ray tracer with new materials and media - a black hole with gravitational lensing is ~200 lines of Julia. Runs on AMD, NVIDIA, and CPU via KernelAbstractions.jl, with Metal coming soon. Demo scenes: github.com/SimonDanisch/RayDemo
Feb 2026 · makie.org · its alternatives →
4KR
KiDoom – Running DOOM on PCB Traces▲362
I got DOOM running in KiCad by rendering it with PCB traces and footprints instead of pixels. Walls are rendered as PCB_TRACK traces, and entities (enemies, items, player) are actual component footprints - SOT-23 for small items, SOIC-8 for decorations, QFP-64 for enemies and the player. How I did it: Started by patching DOOM's source code to extract vector data directly from the engine. Instead of trying to render 64,000 pixels (which would be impossibly slow), I grab the geometry DOOM already calculates internally - the drawsegs[] array for walls and vissprites[] for entities. Added a…
Nov 2025 · mikeayles.com · its alternatives →
5GC
gpudeploy.com – "Airbnb" for GPUs▲267
Hi HN, YC w24 company here. We just pivoted from drone delivery to build gpudeploy.com, a website that routes on-demand traffic for GPU instances to idle compute resources. The experience is similar to lambda labs, which we’ve really enjoyed for training our robotics models, but their GPUs are never available for on-demand. We are also trying to make it more no-nonsense (no hidden fees, no H100 behind “contact sales”, etc.). The tech to make this work is actually kind of nifty, we may do an in-depth HN post on that soon. Right now, we have H100s, a few RTX 4090s and a GTX 1080 Ti online.…
2024 · gpudeploy.com · its alternatives →
6
Auto-Architecture: Karpathy's Loop, pointed at a CPU▲241
Contribute to FeSens/auto-arch-tournament development by creating an account on GitHub.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
7
I wrote a C++ ray tracer from scratch without AI▲155
C++ Path Tracer from scratch with zero third-party libraries. - themartiano/luz
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor▲216
We built a model router that plugs into coding agents (e.g. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) and intelligently sends requests to the best model to serve them. Here's a quick demo of running it locally: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isKhAyivtfM. At Weave, we write most of our code with AI, and it's been getting more expensive. This came to a head when Opus 4.7 was released and, thanks to its tokenizer changes, our costs shot up. We knew we didn't need Opus for everything but we didn't want to lose out on the intelligence for the cases where you really need it. So we decided…
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
9
Attaching to a virtual GPU over TCP▲344
We developed a tool to trick your computer into thinking it’s attached to a GPU which actually sits across a network. This allows you to switch the number or type of GPUs you’re using with a single command.
2024 · thundercompute.com · its alternatives →
10
I've made a Monte-Carlo raytracer for glTF scenes in WebGPU▲131
This is a GPU "software" raytracer (i.e. using manual ray-scene intersections and not RTX) written using the WebGPU API that renders glTF scenes. It supports many materials, textures, material & normal mapping, and heavily relies on multiple importance sampling to speed up convergence.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
11
KiCad in the Browser▲111
KiCad, a PCB EDA suite is now working in a browser, you can try it at the link, there's a demo project or you can bring your own. Firefox is best, Chrome is good, Safari is "working". We’re Emergence Engineering, a dev shop from Hungary, mostly working with rich text editors, CRDTs. PCBJam started as my (Viktor, CTO, ex-electrical engineer) hobby project but as time went on I put more and more energy into it, and a product started shaping up in my head, in the last few months we’ve started to focus on this project a bit more, and this is the first MVP~ish result. This project is a ton of…
Jul 2026 · demo.pcbjam.com · its alternatives →
12
Skill that lets Claude Code/Codex spin up VMs and GPUs▲138
I've been working on CloudRouter, a skill + CLI that gives coding agents like Claude Code and Codex the ability to start cloud VMs and GPUs. When an agent writes code, it usually needs to start a dev server, run tests, open a browser to verify its work. Today that all happens on your local machine. This works fine for a single task, but the agent is sharing your computer: your ports, RAM, screen. If you run multiple agents in parallel, it gets a bit chaotic. Docker helps with isolation, but it still uses your machine's resources, and doesn't give the agent a browser, a desktop, or a GPU to…
Feb 2026 · cloudrouter.dev · its alternatives →
13
US Routing – Python library for fast local routing in the US▲114
us cached road graph, freeways, primary and secondary roads - ivanbelenky/us-routing
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
14OS
Open-source model routing for coding agents at Astra-level performance▲122
22d ago · its alternatives →
15
Luminal – Open-source, search-based GPU compiler▲153
Hi HN, I’m Joe. My friends Matthew, Jake and I are building Luminal (https://luminalai.com/), a GPU compiler for automatically generating fast GPU kernels for AI models. It uses search-based compilation to achieve high performance. We take high level model code, like you'd have in PyTorch, and generate very fast GPU code. We do that without using LLMs or AI - rather, we pose it as a search problem. Our compiler builds a search space, generates millions of possible kernels, and then searches through it to minimize runtime. You can try out a demo in `demos/matmul` on mac to…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
Janus – Go binary that runs GGUF models via Vulkan on AMD/Intel/Nvidia▲106
Janus is a API router for AI models written in Go and has a Vulkan Model runner - Vibra-Ingenn/Janus
20d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
17
Zibra AI▲73
AI-Native Data Infrastructure for Spatial and Physical AI
Apr 2026 · zibra.ai · its alternatives →
18
Physically-Based GPU Pathtracer with Mitsuba XML Support▲63
GPU Raytracer from scratch in C++/CUDA. Contribute to jan-van-bergen/GPU-Raytracer development by creating an account on GitHub.
2021 · github.com · its alternatives →
19
a Rust ray tracer that runs on any GPU – even in the browser▲95
I’ve been experimenting with Rust lately and wanted a project that would help me explore some of its lower-level and performance-oriented features. Inspired by Sebastian Lague’s videos, I decided to implement my own ray tracer from scratch. The initial goal was just to render a simple 3D scene in the browser at a reasonable frame rate. It evolved into a small renderer that can: • Run locally or on the web using wgpu and WebAssembly • Perform mesh rendering with a Bounding Volume Hierarchy (BVH) for acceleration • Simulate both direct and indirect illumination for photorealistic results • Be…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
20
An LLM-Powered PCB Schematic Checker (Major Update)▲55
Traceformer.io is a web application that ingests KiCad projects or Altium netlists along with relevant datasheets, enabling LLM-based schematic review. The system is designed to identify datasheet-driven schematic issues that traditional ERC tools can't detect. Since our first launch (formerly as Netlist.io), we've made some big changes: - Full KiCad project parsing via an open-source plugin - Pass-through API pricing with a small platform fee - Automatic datasheet retrieval - ERC/DRC-style review UI - Revamped review workflow with selectable frontier models (GPT 5.2, Opus 4.5, and…
Jan 2026 · traceformer.io · its alternatives →
21
PewCB▲67
Vibe-routing is coming. Desktop PCB Factory is here.
Sep 2026 · pewcb.com · its alternatives →
22
High speed graphics rendering research with tinygrad/tinyJIT▲31
I saw a tweet that tinygrad is so good that you could make a graphics library that wraps tg. So I’ve been hacking on a gtinygrad, and honestly it convinced me it could be used for legit research. The JIT + tensor model ends up being a really nice way to express light transport all in simple python, so I reimplemented some new research papers from SIGGRAPH like REstir PG and SZ and it just works. instead of complicated cpp its just a 200 LOC of python.
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
A fast, dependency-free traceroute implementation in pure C▲29
A fast, dependency-free traceroute implementation in pure C. - davidesantangelo/fastrace
Oct 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
24
RunMat – runtime with auto CPU/GPU routing for dense math▲21
Hi, I’m Nabeel. In August I released RunMat as an open-source runtime for MATLAB code that was already much faster than GNU Octave on the workloads I tried. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44972919 Since then, I’ve taken it further with RunMat Accelerate: the runtime now automatically fuses operations and routes work between CPU and GPU. You write MATLAB-style code, and RunMat runs your computation across CPUs and GPUs for speed. No CUDA, no kernel code. Under the hood, it builds a graph of your array math, fuses long chains into a few kernels, keeps data on the GPU when…
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →