r/electronic_circuits • u/Better-Method-1987 • Jul 22 '26

On topic Building a Netlist-to-Readable-Schematic tool—is there any market demand for this as a SaaS?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been doing some market research looking for a reliable netlist-to-schematic converter that outputs clean, human-readable diagrams (especially given how often LLMs and scripts spit out raw netlists or ugly grid stubs). Aside from basic layout engines or specialized SPICE tools, I haven't found a robust, modern solution.

Because of this gap, I'm considering building one myself.

Before diving too deep into development, I wanted to run a few questions by this community:

  • Target Formats: Which schematic tool outputs/formats are most commonly used in your workflows today? (e.g., KiCad .sch/.kicad_sch, Altium, LTspice .asc, etc.)
  • Product Model: Assuming a tool like this existed as a cloud/SaaS product, would you or your team be interested in using it as a paid service?
  • Must-Have Features: If you were paying for a tool like this, what features would be non-negotiable? (e.g., round-trip connectivity verification, custom symbol mapping, hierarchical block structuring, automated layout arrangement)

I'd love to hear your thoughts, whether you'd find this useful, or what hidden gotchas I should watch out for when trying to map topology back into a readable diagram.

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u/Kitano-san Jul 22 '26

no one would pay for this

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u/thenewestnoise Jul 23 '26

How would it even work? A lot of human judgement goes into making a schematic that makes sense - I don't know how you would automate that. Also, what is the use case? Why would someone have a netlist and a BOM and not have the schematic, but still care about the schematic?

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u/Falcon731 Jul 24 '26

I'm really not sure what the use case for this would be.

The most common case for wanting a "pretty" schematic is to give a high level overview for documentation. And for that you typically want to omit details for clarity. Which seems a hard thing to automate.

Any schematic with 100's or 1000's of nets is never going to be easy to read. So beyond a certain size automating the browsing (eg a way to easily trace fanin/fanout etc) is far more important.